Pyserini is built on Python 3.10.
At a high level, we try to keep our requirements.txt
up to date.
Pyserini has a number of important dependencies:
- For sparse retrieval, Pyserini depends on Anserini, which is built on Lucene. PyJNIus is used to interact with the JVM.
- For dense retrieval (since it involves neural networks), we need the 🤗 Transformers library, PyTorch, and Faiss (specifically
faiss-cpu
). Apip
installation will automatically pull in the first to satisfy the package requirements, but since the other two may require platform-specific custom configuration, they are not explicitly listed in the package requirements. We leave the installation of these packages to you (but provide detailed instructions below).
Below is a step-by-step Pyserini installation guide based on Python 3.10.
We recommend using Anaconda and assume you have already installed it.
Create new environment:
conda create -n pyserini python=3.10 -y
conda activate pyserini
If you do not already have JDK 21 installed, install via conda
:
conda install -c conda-forge openjdk=21 maven -y
If your system already has JDK 21 installed, the above step can be skipped.
Use java --version
to check one way or the other.
If you're on an Intel-based Mac, the following recipe should work:
conda install wget -y
conda install -c conda-forge openjdk=21 maven -y
conda install -c conda-forge lightgbm nmslib -y
# from https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/blob/main/INSTALL.md
# NOTE: due to a bug in the latest 1.7.4 release, Intel MKL 2021 needs to be installed separately where applicable.
conda install -c pytorch faiss-cpu=1.7.4 mkl=2021 blas=1.0=mkl -y
conda install -c pytorch pytorch -y
pip install pyserini
If you're on a Mac with an M-series (i.e., ARM) processor, the following recipe should work:
conda install wget -y
conda install -c conda-forge openjdk=21 maven -y
conda install -c conda-forge lightgbm nmslib -y
conda install -c pytorch faiss-cpu pytorch -y
pip install pyserini
As of April 2024, for faiss-cpu
, osx-64
is still at v1.7.4, whereas osx-arm64
is at v1.8.0; hence the differences in the instructions above.
On Linux, pip
is an alternative that's a bit more lightweight:
pip install torch faiss-cpu
pip install pyserini
By this point, Pyserini should have been installed. It might be worthwhile to do a bit of sanity checking, per below.
To confirm that bag-of-words retrieval is working correctly, you can run the BM25 baseline on the MS MARCO passage ranking task:
$ python -m pyserini.search.lucene \
--topics msmarco-passage-dev-subset \
--index msmarco-v1-passage \
--output run.msmarco-passage.txt \
--output-format msmarco \
--bm25
$ python -m pyserini.eval.msmarco_passage_eval msmarco-passage-dev-subset run.msmarco-passage.txt
#####################
MRR @10: 0.18741227770955546
QueriesRanked: 6980
#####################
To confirm that dense retrieval is working correctly, you can run our TCT-ColBERT (v2) model on the MS MARCO passage ranking task:
$ python -m pyserini.search.faiss \
--topics msmarco-passage-dev-subset \
--index msmarco-v1-passage.tct_colbert-v2-hnp \
--encoded-queries tct_colbert-v2-hnp-msmarco-passage-dev-subset \
--threads 12 --batch-size 384 \
--output run.msmarco-passage.tct_colbert-v2.bf.tsv \
--output-format msmarco
$ python -m pyserini.eval.msmarco_passage_eval msmarco-passage-dev-subset run.msmarco-passage.tct_colbert-v2.bf.tsv
#####################
MRR @10: 0.3584
QueriesRanked: 6980
#####################
If everything is working properly, you should be able to reproduce the results above.
If you're planning on just using Pyserini, then the instructions above are fine. However, if you're planning on contributing to the codebase or want to work with the latest not-yet-released features, you'll need a development installation.
Start the same way as the install above, but don't install pip install pyserini
.
Instead, clone the Pyserini repo with the --recurse-submodules
option to make sure the tools/
submodule also gets cloned:
git clone [email protected]:castorini/pyserini.git --recurse-submodules
The tools/
directory, which contains evaluation tools and scripts, is actually this repo, integrated as a Git submodule (so that it can be shared across related projects).
Change into the pyserini
subdirectory and build as follows (you might get warnings, but okay to ignore):
cd tools/eval && tar xvfz trec_eval.9.0.4.tar.gz && cd trec_eval.9.0.4 && make && cd ../../..
cd tools/eval/ndeval && make && cd ../../..
Then, in the pyserini
clone, use pip
to add an "editable" installation, as follows:
pip install -e .
You'll need to download the Spacy English model to reproduce tasks such as LTR Filtering for MS MARCO Passage.
python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm
Next, you'll need to clone and build Anserini.
It makes sense to put both pyserini/
and anserini/
in a common folder.
After you've successfully built Anserini, copy the fatjar, which will be target/anserini-X.Y.Z-SNAPSHOT-fatjar.jar
into pyserini/resources/jars/
.
As with the pip
installation, a potential source of frustration is incompatibility among different versions of underlying dependencies.
You can confirm everything is working by running the unit tests:
python -m unittest
Assuming all tests pass, you should be ready to go!
- The above guide handle JVM installation via conda. If you are using your own Java environment and get an error about Java version mismatch, it's likely an issue with your
JAVA_HOME
environmental variable. Inbash
, useecho $JAVA_HOME
to find out what the environmental variable is currently set to, and useexport JAVA_HOME=/path/to/java/home
to change it to the correct path. On a Linux system, the correct path might look something like/usr/lib/jvm/java-21
. Unfortunately, we are unable to offer more concrete advice since the actual path depends on your OS, which JDK you're using, and a host of other factors. - On Apple's M-series processors, make sure you've installed the ARM-based release of Conda instead of the Intel-based release.
At the University of Waterloo, we have two (CPU) development servers, tuna
and orca
.
Note that on these two servers, the root disk (where your home directory is mounted) doesn't have much space.
So, you need to set pyserini cache path to scratch space.
- For tuna, create the dir
/tuna1/scratch/{username}
- For ocra, create the dir
/store/scratch/{username}
Set the PYSERINI_CACHE
environment variable to point to the directory you created above.