Improving information retrieval in the Elastic Stack

This series explores steps to improve search relevance, benchmarking passage retrieval, ELSER, and hybrid retrieval.

Part 1

Improving information retrieval in the Elastic Stack: Steps to improve search relevance

July 13, 2023

Improving information retrieval in the Elastic Stack: Steps to improve search relevance

In this first blog post, we will list and explain the differences between the primary building blocks available in the Elastic Stack to do information retrieval.

Part 2

Improving information retrieval in the Elastic Stack: Benchmarking passage retrieval

July 13, 2023

Improving information retrieval in the Elastic Stack: Benchmarking passage retrieval

In this blog post, we'll examine benchmark solutions to compare retrieval methods. We use a collection of data sets to benchmark BM25 against two dense models and illustrate the potential gain using fine-tuning strategies with one of those models.

Part 3

Improving information retrieval in the Elastic Stack: Introducing Elastic Learned Sparse Encoder, our new retrieval model

June 21, 2023

Improving information retrieval in the Elastic Stack: Introducing Elastic Learned Sparse Encoder, our new retrieval model

Learn about the Elastic Learned Sparse Encoder (ELSER), its retrieval performance, architecture, and training process.

Part 4

Improving information retrieval in the Elastic Stack: Hybrid retrieval

July 20, 2023

Improving information retrieval in the Elastic Stack: Hybrid retrieval

In this blog we introduce hybrid retrieval and explore two concrete implementations in Elasticsearch. We explore improving Elastic Learned Sparse Encoder’s performance by combining it with BM25 using Reciprocal Rank Fusion and Weighted Sum of Scores.

Ready to build state of the art search experiences?

Sufficiently advanced search isn’t achieved with the efforts of one. Elasticsearch is powered by data scientists, ML ops, engineers, and many more who are just as passionate about search as your are. Let’s connect and work together to build the magical search experience that will get you the results you want.

Try it yourself