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Semantic search engine for ArXiv, biorxiv and medrxiv

embedding search via https://searchthearxiv.com/ takes either a word vector, or an abs or pdf link to an arxiv paper.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42519487

I just did a spot check, I think searchthearxiv search results are superior.

3 days agositkack

Looks cool! You can input either a search query or a paper URL on arxiv xplorer. You can even combine paper URLs to search for combinations of ideas by putting + or - before the URL, like `+ 2501.12948 + 1712.01815`

3 days ago0101111101

That is neat I like that.

It would be cool if the "More Like This" had a + button that would append the arxiv id to the search query.

3 days agositkack

That's a nice idea! Might take a look this weekend!

2 days ago0101111101

There’s also the search and browsing on https://sugaku.net, it’s more focused on math but does also have all of the arxiv on it

3 days agomasterjack

Just curious, are there any techniques other than using embeddings, computing cosine similarity, and sorting the results based on that? RRF could be used but again its very simple as well.

3 days agonblgbg

My understanding is that your levers are roughly better / more diverse embeddings or computing more embeddings (embed chunks / groups / etc) + aggregating more cosine similarities / scores. More flops = better search w/ steep diminishing returns

Colbert being a good google-able application of utilizing more embeddings.

Search ends up often being a funnel of techniques. Cheap and high recall for phase 1 and ratchet up the flops and precision in subsequent passes on the previous result set.

3 days agoforrestp

Exactly! A near property of the matryoshka embeddings is that you can compute a low dimension embedding similarity really fast and then refine afterwards.

2 days ago0101111101

This is really cool, and very relevant to something I'm working on. Would you be willing to do a quick explanation of the build?

3 days agoelliotec

Sure! I first used openai embeddings on all the paper titles, abstracts and authors. When a user submits a search query, I embed the query, find the closest matching papers and return those results. Nothing too fancy involved!

I'm also maintaining a dataset of all the embeddings on kaggle if you want to use them yourself: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/tomtum/openai-arxiv-embeddin...

3 days ago0101111101

So did you just combine Title+Abstracts+Authors into a single chunk and embed them or embedded them individually?

3 days agoheisenburgzero

Impressive! Will you parse the papers in the future? Without citations this is not that usable for professors or scientists in general. The relevance ranking largely depends on showing these older, prominent papers. (from our lab experience building decentralised search using transformers)

3 days agosynctext

One chunk embedded together

2 days ago0101111101

That method can break when author names and subject matter collide.

3 days agocluckindan

True, but similarly if your embeddings are any good they'll capture interesting associations between authors, topics and your search query. If you find any interesting author overlap results I'd be very interested!

2 days ago0101111101

Thank you!!

3 days agoelliotec

Looks great! Could you add eprint.iacr.org (Cryptology ePrint Archive)?

3 days agomadars

Do they have a public API/dataset?

3 days ago0101111101

Oh god, there's a medrxiv?? TIL...

Don't forget chemrXiv!

3 days agobbor

medrxiv was very useful for keeping the various COVID-19 related preprints from completely swamping biorxiv, especially once biorxiv started aggressively rejecting them.

3 days agoFomite

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3 days agofaffdsf

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