"The State of Information Retrieval in 2026"

This is the best survey article I have seen in a long time in this niche.

The dominant retriever in 2026 is an 8-billion-parameter decoder-only language model fine-tuned on synthetic data, conditioned on natural-language instructions, often executing chain-of-thought reasoning before deciding what to retrieve.

https://medium.com/@mohankrishnagr08/the-state-of-information-retrieval-in-2026-192f125a5269

#research #informationRetrieval #RAG #LLM #SPLADE #AIbenchmark #AI

"Neural Lexical Search with Learned Sparse Retrieval" - SIGIR tutorial with slides, demo, COLAB notebooks

Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) techniques use neural machinery to represent queries & documents as learned bags of words. In contrast with other neural retrieval techniques, such as generative retrieval and dense retrieval, LSR has been shown to be a remarkably robust, transferable, and efficient family of methods for retrieving high-quality search results

https://lsr-tutorial.github.io

#SPLADE