Streamlit is an open-source Python library that makes it easy to create applications for machine learning and data science. With Streamlit, you don’t need to learn Flask or any frontend development and you can focus solely on your application.

Our app will help users search for academic articles. Users will type text queries in a search box and retrieve the most relevant publications and their metadata. They will also be able to choose the number of returned results and filter them by the number of paper citations and the publication year.

Behind the scenes, we will vectorise the search query with a sentence-DistilBERT model and pass it onto a pre-built Faiss index for similarity matching. Faiss will measure the L2 distance between the query vector and the indexed paper vectors and return a list of paper IDs that are closest to the query.

Let’s see how the app will look like and then dive into the code.

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