Try out d2lang to visualize the onboarding path

[lintool]

Hi @lilyjge can you look at this?
https://d2lang.com/

I've heard good things about it. Perhaps we can use it to diagram our onboarding path?

I have two goals here:

1. I want to learn more about the features of d2lang - "diagrams as code" seems like a great idea... better than my current pptx workflow for diagrams (in Anserini/Pyserini/etc.)
2. Our onboarding path is getting complicated... perhaps a diagram can help newcomers?

[lilyjge]

Yes, it is great! Syntax is simple and easy to use. Attached is a replica of this diagram I was able to whip up really quickly. D2 supports icons as well, I just didn't add them. It has pretty cool features like markdown, code snippets, icons/images, SQL tables, sequence diagrams, and grids. It also looks nice with some default colour themes and customizability with CSS.
A diagram could definitely help with the onboarding path. Do you mean the actual retrieval pipeline or the various onboarding docs? I think the bi-encoder architecture is a pretty good overview of the retrieval pipeline already, but a diagram would be useful to lay out how the different onboarding docs relate to each other in a higher level.

[lintool]

Oh nice!

Share code for above diagram?

I was thinking of diagramming our onboarding sequence - i.e., first anserini, then pyserini, then rankllm? And then we are starting to have offshoots... like your vector store stuff and ONNX. There are dependencies we should note...

[lilyjge]

For the earlier diagram:

Documents -> doc_encoded: Doc Encoder
doc_encoded: "[...]\n[...]\n[...]"
q_encoded: "[...]"
Query Encoder -> q_encoded: Query Encoder
q_encoded -> Top-k Retrieval <- doc_encoded
Top-k Retrieval -> Ranked List

Something like this for onboarding?

Code:

Anserini : {
    BM 25 Baselines for MS MARCO Passage -> Dense Retrieval for MS MARCO Passage 
    direction: down
}
Pyserini: {
    BM 25 Baselines for MS MARCO Passage -> Conceptual Framework for Retrieval -> BGE-base Baseline for NFCorpus -> A Deeper Dive into Dense and Sparse Representations
    direction: down
}
RankLLM: Reranking with LLMs
Anserini -> Pyserini -> RankLLM

I think it would look nicer if the containers went left to right while keeping the subtasks up down, but the only layout engine that would support different directions is paid.