Cydex: Neural Search Infrastructure for the Scholarly Literature
Shane Ding, Edwin Zhang, Jimmy Lin · 2020
Cydex is a platform that provides neural search infrastructure for domain-specific scholarly literature.The platform represents an abstraction of Covidex, our recently developed full-stack open-source search engine for the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) from AI2.While Covidex takes advantage of the latest best practices for keyword search using the popular Lucene search library as well as stateof-the-art neural ranking models using T5, parts of the system were hard coded to only work with CORD-19.This paper describes our efforts to generalize Covidex into Cydex, which can be applied to scholarly literature in different domains.By decoupling corpusspecific configurations from the frontend implementation, we are able to demonstrate the generality of Cydex on two very different corpora: the ACL Anthology and a collection of hydrology abstracts.Our platform is entirely open source and available at cydex.ai.