As entity-oriented search takes the lead in modern search, the need for increasingly flexible tools, capable of motivating innovation in information retrieval research, also becomes more evident. Army ANT is an open source framework that takes a step forward in generalizing information retrieval research, so that modern approaches can be easily integrated in a shared evaluation environment. We present an overview on the system architecture of Army ANT, which has four main abstractions: (i) readers, to iterate over text collections, potentially containing associated entities and triples; (ii) engines, that implement indexing and searching approaches, supporting different retrieval tasks and ranking functions; (iii) databases, to store additional document metadata; and (iv) evaluators, to assess retrieval performance for specific tasks and test collections. We also introduce the command line interface and the web interface, presenting a learn mode as a way to explore, analyze and understand representation and retrieval models, through tracing, score component visualization and documentation.
Army ANT: A Workbench for Innovation in Entity-Oriented Search