We present Covidex, a search engine that exploits the latest neural ranking models to provide information access to the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset curated by the Allen Institute for AI. Our system has been online and serving users since late March 2020. The Covidex is the user application component of our three-pronged strategy to develop technologies for helping domain experts tackle the ongoing global pandemic. In addition, we provide robust and easy-to-use keyword search infrastructure that exploits mature fusion-based methods as well as standalone neural ranking models that can be incorporated into other applications. These techniques have been evaluated in the multi-round TREC-COVID challenge: Our infrastructure and baselines have been adopted by many participants, including some of the best systems. In round 3, we submitted the highest-scoring run that took advantage of previous training data and the second-highest fully automatic run. In rounds 4 and 5, we submitted the highest-scoring fully automatic runs.

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 state-of-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 corpus-specific 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.

The Neural Covidex is a search engine that exploits the latest neural ranking architectures to provide information access to the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) curated by the Allen Institute for AI. It exists as part of a suite of tools we have developed to help domain experts tackle the ongoing global pandemic. We hope that improved information access capabilities to the scientific literature can inform evidence-based decision making and insight generation.