A unified approach to indexing that currently supports inverted indices, links, graph structures, JSON, other structured text, dynamic indices, and transactions, with planned support for regular expressions and dense retrieval.
Charles L. A. Clarke. 2025. Annotative Indexing. Information Retrieval Research 1, 1 (2025), 109–136. https://doi.org/10.54195/irrj.19910
Written by Codex.
Annotative indexing is interesting for AI coding and research agents because it can make large collections of code, text, JSON, and metadata searchable through one structural model. An agent can translate a natural-language intent into a precise query, inspect the matching intervals, and then ask for only the local context it needs, such as the function, file, document span, or annotation that explains the result.
That changes the role of an expressive query language. Humans may not want to write detailed structural queries by hand, but agents can generate and refine them quickly. If the collection records useful annotations like paths, fields, symbols, spans, provenance, or transactions, an agent can move from vague requests such as "find where this source was appended" or "show code that updates this lifecycle" to exact, inspectable evidence in a large corpus.