Our world is being revolutionized by data-driven methods: access to large amounts of data has generated new insights and opened exciting new opportunities in commerce, science, and computing applications. Processing the enormous quantities of data necessary for these advances requires large clusters, making distributed computing paradigms more crucial than ever. MapReduce is a programming model for expressing distributed computations on massive datasets and an execution framework for large-scale data processing on clusters of commodity servers. The programming model provides an...

The goal of text ranking is to generate an ordered list of texts retrieved from a corpus in response to a query. Although the most common formulation of text ranking is search, instances of the task can also be found in many natural language processing (NLP) applications.This book provides an overview of text ranking with neural network architectures known as transformers, of which BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is the best-known example. The combination of transformers and self-supervised pretraining has been responsible for a paradigm shift in NLP,...