txtai 4.2.1

Build AI-powered semantic search applications

Build AI-powered semantic search applications

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txtai executes machine-learning workflows to transform data and build AI-powered semantic search applications.

Traditional search systems use keywords to find data. Semantic search applications have an understanding of natural language and identify results that have the same meaning, not necessarily the same keywords.

Backed by state-of-the-art machine learning models, data is transformed into vector representations for search (also known as embeddings). Innovation is happening at a rapid pace, models can understand concepts in documents, audio, images and more.

Summary of txtai features:

• 🔎 Large-scale similarity search with multiple index backends (Faiss, Annoy, Hnswlib)
• 📄 Create embeddings for text snippets, documents, audio, images and video. Supports transformers and word vectors.
• 💡 Machine-learning pipelines to run extractive question-answering, zero-shot labeling, transcription, translation, summarization and text extraction
• ↪️️ Workflows that join pipelines together to aggregate business logic. txtai processes can be microservices or full-fledged indexing workflows.
• 🔗 API bindings for JavaScript, Java, Rust and Go
• ☁️ Cloud-native architecture that scales out with container orchestration systems (e.g. Kubernetes)

Applications range from similarity search to complex NLP-driven data extractions to generate structured databases. The following applications are powered by txtai.

Application	Description
paperai	AI-powered literature discovery and review engine for medical/scientific papers
tldrstory	AI-powered understanding of headlines and story text
neuspo	Fact-driven, real-time sports event and news site
codequestion	Ask coding questions directly from the terminal

txtai is built with Python 3.7+, Hugging Face Transformers, Sentence Transformers and FastAPI

Why txtai?

In addition to traditional search systems, a growing number of semantic search solutions are available, so why txtai?

• pip install txtai is all you need

# Get started in a couple lines
from txtai.embeddings import Embeddings

embeddings = Embeddings({"path": "sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2"})
embeddings.index([(0, "Correct", None), (1, "Not what we hoped", None)])
embeddings.search("positive", 1)
#[(0, 0.2986203730106354)]

• Works well with both small and big data - scale up as needed
• Rich data processing framework (pipelines and workflows) to pre and post process data
• Work in your programming language of choice via the API
• Modular with low footprint - install additional dependencies when you need them
• Learn by example - notebooks cover all available functionality

Installation

The easiest way to install is via pip and PyPI

pip install txtai

Python 3.7+ is supported. Using a Python virtual environment is recommended.

See the detailed install instructions for more information covering optional dependencies, environment specific prerequisites, installing from source and how to run with containers.

Examples

The examples directory has a series of notebooks and applications giving an overview of txtai. See the sections below.

Semantic Search

Build semantic/similarity/vector/neural search applications.

Notebook	Description
Introducing txtai	Overview of the functionality provided by txtai
Build an Embeddings index with Hugging Face Datasets	Index and search Hugging Face Datasets
Build an Embeddings index from a data source	Index and search a data source with word embeddings
Add semantic search to Elasticsearch	Add semantic search to existing search systems
Similarity search with images	Embed images and text into the same space for search
Distributed embeddings cluster	Distribute an embeddings index across multiple data nodes
What's new in txtai 4.0	Content storage, SQL, object storage, reindex and compressed indexes

Pipelines

Transform data with NLP-backed pipelines.

Notebook	Description
Extractive QA with txtai	Introduction to extractive question-answering with txtai
Extractive QA with Elasticsearch	Run extractive question-answering queries with Elasticsearch
Extractive QA to build structured data	Build structured datasets using extractive question-answering
Apply labels with zero shot classification	Use zero shot learning for labeling, classification and topic modeling
Building abstractive text summaries	Run abstractive text summarization
Extract text from documents	Extract text from PDF, Office, HTML and more
Transcribe audio to text	Convert audio files to text
Translate text between languages	Streamline machine translation and language detection
Generate image captions and detect objects	Captions and object detection for images
API Gallery	Using txtai in JavaScript, Java, Rust and Go

Workflows

Efficiently process data at scale.

Notebook	Description
Run pipeline workflows	Simple yet powerful constructs to efficiently process data
Transform tabular data with composable workflows	Transform, index and search tabular data
Tensor workflows	Performant processing of large tensor arrays
Entity extraction workflows	Identify entity/label combinations
Workflow Scheduling	Schedule workflows with cron expressions
Push notifications with workflows	Generate and push notifications with workflows

Model Training

Train NLP models.

Notebook	Description
Train a text labeler	Build text sequence classification models
Train without labels	Use zero-shot classifiers to train new models
Train a QA model	Build and fine-tune question-answering models
Export and run models with ONNX	Export models with ONNX, run natively in JavaScript, Java and Rust
Export and run other machine learning models	Export and run models from scikit-learn, PyTorch and more

Applications

Series of example applications with txtai. Links to hosted versions on Hugging Face Spaces also provided.

Application	Description
Basic similarity search	Basic similarity search example. Data from the original txtai demo.	🤗
Book search	Book similarity search application. Index book descriptions and query using natural language statements.	Local run only
Image search	Image similarity search application. Index a directory of images and run searches to identify images similar to the input query.	🤗
Summarize an article	Summarize an article. Workflow that extracts text from a webpage and builds a summary.	🤗
Wiki search	Wikipedia search application. Queries Wikipedia API and summarizes the top result.	🤗
Workflow builder	Build and execute txtai workflows. Connect summarization, text extraction, transcription, translation and similarity search pipelines together to run unified workflows.	🤗

Documentation

Full documentation on txtai including configuration settings for pipelines, workflows, indexing and the API.

Further Reading

• Introducing txtai, AI-powered semantic search built on Transformers
• Run machine-learning workflows to transform data and build AI-powered semantic search applications with txtai
• Semantic search on the cheap
• What's new in txtai 4.0
• Tutorial series on dev.to

Contributing

For those who would like to contribute to txtai, please see this guide.