Relativity uses Elasticsearch and Azure OpenAI to build futuristic search experiences, today

Elasticsearch^® has been used by developers to build search experiences for over a decade. At Microsoft Build this year, we announced the launch of Elasticsearch Relevance Engine™ — a set of tools to enable developers to build AI-powered search applications. With generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and vector search capabilities gaining mindshare, we are delighted to expand our range of tools and enable our customers in building the next generation of search apps.  

One example of what a next-generation search experience might look like comes from Relativity — the eDiscovery and legal search technology company. At Build, we shared the stage with the Relativity team as they spoke about how they’re using Elasticsearch and Microsoft Azure. You can read about Relativity’s coverage of Build on their blog. 

Brittany Roush, senior product manager at Relativity, says, “The biggest challenge Relativity customers are facing right now is data explosion from heterogeneous data sources. The challenge is really compounded by the differences in data generated from different modes of communication.” This explosion of data, sources, and complexity renders traditional keyword search approaches ineffective. With Elasticsearch Relevance Engine (ESRE™), Relativity sees the potential of providing a search experience that goes beyond keyword search and basic conceptual search. ESRE provides an opportunity to natively tailor searches to case data. Relativity wants to augment the search experience with AI capabilities such as GPT-4, Signals, Classifications, and its in-house AI solutions. 

In this talk at Microsoft Build, Roush shared that in Relativity’s future vision for search, there are a few key challenges. As data grows exponentially, and as investigators must search through documents, images, and video records, traditional keyword search approaches can reach their limits. Privacy and confidentiality are key factors in the legal discovery process. Additionally, the ability to search as if you’re having a natural conversation and leveraging LLMs are all important factors when the team imagines the future of search.

In making the vision for the future of eDiscover search real, Relativity relies on Elasticsearch for its proven track record at scale, the ability to manage structured and unstructured data sources, and its leadership in search and hybrid scoring. ESRE provides an opportunity to natively tailor searches to case data.

With Elasticsearch Relevance Engine, developers get a full vector database, the ability to manage multiple machine learning models or Elastic’s Learned Sparse Encoder that comes included with ESRE, and a plethora of data ingestion capabilities. Roush adds, “With ESRE and Azure OpenAI-powered search experiences, we aim to reduce what may take our customers months during an investigation to hours.”

Natural language processing (NLP)
NLP offers the ability to interact with a search interface using human language, or spoken intent. The search engine must identify intent and match it to data records. An example is matching “side hustle” to mean a secondary work occupation.

Vector database
This is a database that stores data as numerical representations, or vectors embeddings, across a vector space that may span several dimensions. Each dimension may be a mathematical representation of features or attributes used to describe search documents.

Vector search
A vector space is a mathematical representation of search documents as numbers. Traditional search relies on placement of keywords, frequency, and lexical similarity. A vector search engine uses numerical distances between vectors to represent similarity.

Model flexibility and LLM integration
In this fast-evolving space, support for public and proprietary machine learning models and the ability to switch models enables customers to keep up with innovation.

In order to build a search experience that understands natural language search prompts, stores underlying data as vectors, and leverages a large language model to present context-relevant responses, an approach such as the one below may be used:

In order to achieve goals, for example building next-generation eDiscovery search leveraging LLM like OpenAI, users should consider the following factors:

We’re excited about the experiences that customers such as Relativity are building. The past few years in search have been very exciting, but with the rapid adoption of generative AI capabilities, we can’t wait to see what developers create with Elastic’s tools. If you’d like to try some of the capabilities that were mentioned here, we recommend these resources:

• Demo video: State of the Art Data Retrieval with Machine Learning & Elasticsearch 
• Blog: How to deploy NLP: Text Embeddings and Vector Search
• Announcing Elasticsearch Relevance Engine: AI search tools for developers
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