Setting up NBoost for the Bing Search API

The Bing Search API offers a handy REST service that we can use to get preliminary results before we rerank with NBoost, or for usage with question answering. We will walk through an example of how to set up a Bing-Powered QA system.

Preliminaries

1. Get your Bing API key.
2. Check out the Bing DSL docs for background on how to normally use the API.

Deploying the Proxy

Just like the Elasticsearch tutorial, we will go through the three ways to configure NBoost.

1. Via Command Line:

   On the command line, let’s run:

   nboost                                  \
       --uhost api.cognitive.microsoft.com \
       --uport 443                         \
       --ussl True                         \
       --topn 20                           \
       --search_route /bing/v7.0/search    \
       --query_path url.query.q            \
       --topk_path url.query.count         \
       --default_topk 10                   \
       --choices_path body.webPages.value  \
       --cvalues_path snippet              \
       --qa True                           \
       --qa_model PtDistilBertQAModelPlugin      
   

   Then we can query NBoost.

   curl -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <BING API KEY>" localhost:8000/bing/v7.0/search?q=how+old+is+obama&count=1&responseFilter=Webpages
   

2. Via json.

   On the command line, let’s run:

   nboost --search_route /bing/v7.0/search --qa True --qa_model PtDistilBertQAModelPlugin
   

   In a python script, we can run:

   import requests
   from pprint import pprint
   
   response = requests.get(
       url='http://localhost:8000/bing/v7.0/search',
       headers={'Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key': '<BING API KEY>'},
       params={'q': 'how old is obama', 'responseFilter': 'Webpages'},
       json={
           'nboost': {
               'uhost': 'api.cognitive.microsoft.com',
               'uport': 443,
               'topn': 20,
               'query_path': 'url.query.q',
               'topk_path': 'url.query.count',
               'default_topk': 10,
               'choices_path': 'body.webPages.value',
               'cvalues_path': 'snippet'
           }
       }
   )
   
   pprint(response.json())
   

3. Via query params.

   On the command line, let’s run:

   nboost --search_route /bing/v7.0/search --qa True --qa_model PtDistilBertQAModelPlugin
   

   In a python script, we can run:

   import requests
   from pprint import pprint
   
   response = requests.get(
      url='http://localhost:8000/bing/v7.0/search',
      headers={'Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key': '<BING API KEY>'},
      params={
          'q': 'how old is obama',
          'responseFilter': 'Webpages',
          'uhost': 'api.cognitive.microsoft.com',
          'uport': 443,
          'topn': 20,
          'query_path': 'url.query.q',
          'topk_path': 'url.query.count',
          'default_topk': 10,
          'choices_path': 'body.webPages.value',
          'cvalues_path': 'snippet'
      }
   )
   
   pprint(response.json())
   

No matter how we query, the json response will look like this:

{"_type": "SearchResponse",
 "nboost": {"answer_start_pos": 115,
            "answer_stop_pos": 127,
            "answer_text": "53 years old."},
 "queryContext": {"originalQuery": "how old is obama"},
 "webPages": {"totalEstimatedMatches": 81700000,
              "value": [{"about": [{"name": "Barack Obama"}],
                         "dateLastCrawled": "2019-11-28T01:11:00.0000000Z",
                         "displayUrl": "https://www.answers.com/Q/How_old_is_Barack_Obama",
                         "id": "https://api.cognitive.microsoft.com/api/v7/#WebPages.11",
                         "isFamilyFriendly": true,
                         "isNavigational": false,
                         "language": "en",
                         "name": "How old is Barack Obama - Answers",
                         "snippet": "The correct spelling Barack Obama. Barack "
                                    "Obama was born on August 4th, 1961. As of "
                                    "February 2015, Barack Obama is 53 years "
                                    "old.",
                         "url": "https://www.answers.com/Q/How_old_is_Barack_Obama"},
    ...

The nboost key signifies that the webpages were reranked. NBoost returns the answer_text, and the offsets from the QA Model in the answer_start_pos and answer_stop_pos keys.