dataset.search() (elastic) cannot reliably retrieve search results
Author: afogarty85
State: closed

I am trying to use elastic search to retrieve the indices of items in the dataset in their precise order, given shuffled training indices.

The problem I have is that I cannot retrieve reliable results with my data on my first search. I have to run the search **twice** to get the right answer.

I am indexing data that looks like the following from the HF SQuAD 2.0 data set:

```
['57318658e6313a140071d02b',
 '56f7165e3d8e2e1400e3733a',
 '570e2f6e0b85d914000d7d21',
 '5727e58aff5b5019007d97d0',
 '5a3b5a503ff257001ab8441f',
 '57262fab271a42140099d725']
```



To reproduce the issue, try:

```
from datasets import load_dataset, load_metric
from transformers import BertTokenizerFast, BertForQuestionAnswering
from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
import numpy as np
import collections
from tqdm.auto import tqdm
import torch

# from https://colab.research.google.com/github/huggingface/notebooks/blob/master/examples/question_answering.ipynb#scrollTo=941LPhDWeYv-
tokenizer = BertTokenizerFast.from_pretrained('bert-base-uncased')
max_length = 384 # The maximum length of a feature (question and context)
doc_stride = 128 # The authorized overlap between two part of the context when splitting it is needed.
pad_on_right = tokenizer.padding_side == "right"
squad_v2 = True

# from https://colab.research.google.com/github/huggingface/notebooks/blob/master/examples/question_answering.ipynb#scrollTo=941LPhDWeYv-
def prepare_validation_features(examples):
    # Tokenize our examples with truncation and maybe padding, but keep the overflows using a stride. This results
    # in one example possible giving several features when a context is long, each of those features having a
    # context that overlaps a bit the context of the previous feature.
    tokenized_examples = tokenizer(
        examples["question" if pad_on_right else "context"],
        examples["context" if pad_on_right else "question"],
        truncation="only_second" if pad_on_right else "only_first",
        max_length=max_length,
        stride=doc_stride,
        return_overflowing_tokens=True,
        return_offsets_mapping=True,
        padding="max_length",
    )

    # Since one example might give us several features if it has a long context, we need a map from a feature to
    # its corresponding example. This key gives us just that.
    sample_mapping = tokenized_examples.pop("overflow_to_sample_mapping")

    # We keep the example_id that gave us this feature and we will store the offset mappings.
    tokenized_examples["example_id"] = []

    for i in range(len(tokenized_examples["input_ids"])):
        # Grab the sequence corresponding to that example (to know what is the context and what is the question).
        sequence_ids = tokenized_examples.sequence_ids(i)
        context_index = 1 if pad_on_right else 0

        # One example can give several spans, this is the index of the example containing this span of text.
        sample_index = sample_mapping[i]
        tokenized_examples["example_id"].append(examples["id"][sample_index])

        # Set to None the offset_mapping that are not part of the context so it's easy to determine if a token
        # position is part of the context or not.
        tokenized_examples["offset_mapping"][i] = [
            (list(o) if sequence_ids[k] == context_index else None)
            for k, o in enumerate(tokenized_examples["offset_mapping"][i])
        ]

    return tokenized_examples





# build base examples, features set of training data
shuffled_idx = pd.read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/afogarty85/temp/main/idx.csv')['idx'].to_list()
examples = load_dataset("squad_v2").shuffle(seed=1)['train']
features = load_dataset("squad_v2").shuffle(seed=1)['train'].map(
    prepare_validation_features,
    batched=True,
    remove_columns=['answers', 'context', 'id', 'question', 'title'])
# reorder features by the training process
features = features.select(indices=shuffled_idx)
# get the example ids to match with the "example" data; get unique entries
id_list = list(dict.fromkeys(features['example_id']))
# now search for their index positions in the examples data set; load elastic search
es = Elasticsearch([{'host': 'localhost'}]).ping()
# add an index to the id column for the examples
examples.add_elasticsearch_index(column='id')
# retrieve the example index
example_idx_k1 = [examples.search(index_name='id', query=i, k=1).indices for i in id_list]
example_idx_k1 = [item for sublist in example_idx_k1 for item in sublist]

example_idx_k2 = [examples.search(index_name='id', query=i, k=3).indices for i in id_list]
example_idx_k2 = [item for sublist in example_idx_k2 for item in sublist]

len(example_idx_k1)  # should be 130319
len(example_idx_k2)  # should be 130319

#trial 1 lengths:
# k=1: 130314
# k=3: 130319

# trial 2:
# just run k=3 first: 130310
# try k=1 after k=3: 130319
```



Comments: Hi !
I tried your code on my side and I was able to workaround this issue by waiting a few seconds before querying the index.
Maybe this is because the index is not updated yet on the ElasticSearch side ?

Thanks for the feedback! I added a 30 second "sleep" and that seemed to work well!