slckl / qpick

Search for similar short strings

qpick

Search for similar short strings (queries in particular) based on keyword matches and TF-IDF-like scoring function.

Install

With Rust already installed, run:

git clone https://github.com/dncc/qpick.git && cd qpick
make install

Without Rust installation, run:

git clone https://github.com/dncc/qpick.git && cd qpick
make install/rust
make install

Indexing

An expected input to build a search index is a directory containing *.gz files. Each line found in files is indexed as a separate query. A unique ordinal number of the line represents its unique id.

The search index is built in 2 stages, sharding and compilation:

• To shard a test data set from ./test/sample.gz into 32 shards and store them in the ./index directory, run:

./bin/target/release/qpick shard ./test/sample.gz 32 ./index ""

• To compile shards into a search index and store it in the ./index directory, run:

./bin/target/release/qpick index ./index 0 32 ./index

Each shard is compiled in parallel. Since it could take a lot of RAM to compile a large number of queries at once (e.g. 5 billion), it is possible to compile only a few shards at the time. The following command would compile just 5 shards (shards 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4):

./bin/target/release/qpick index ./index 0 5 ./index

Searching

Once indexing is completed, searching can be done from the command line:

For instance:

./bin/target/release/qpick get "changing mac os menu bar" 10

gives (with the ./test/sample.gz data set):

#=> [(0, 0.39147103, "changing mac menu bar"), (1, 0.5766359, "emails menu bar mac os")]

where each result is a tuple, containing:

• query id,

• distance from the original query, in the range from 0.0 to 1.0, where zero is the best (the closest) and 1 is the worst (the furthest) result,

• and query.

Or the same example from python:

from rust_qpick import Qpick
qpick = Qpick("./index")

# lookup with one query
list(qpick.get('changing mac os menu bar', 10))

# => [(0, 0.39147108793258667, 'changing mac menu bar'),
#     (1, 0.5766359567642212, 'emails menu bar mac os')]