Project library

Smart Sentence Retriever

Find relevant sentences by meaning, even when the wording differs.

Sentence Search

Describe an idea to find related sentences in Alice in Wonderland.

STAR Summary

Situation
I wanted a fast way to retrieve sentences that answer a question even when the wording doesn't match exactly.
Task
Build a semantic-search demo that retrieves and ranks relevant sentences even when a question uses different wording.
Action
  • Cleaned Project Gutenberg text, split it into sentences, and precomputed embeddings for the fixed corpus.
  • Compared several embedding models on a sample subset and balanced clustering quality against model size and serverless deployment cost.
  • Deployed the selected model behind an immutable AWS Lambda alias and a same-origin IAM proxy, with a browser demo that checks `/health` before ranking top-k matches by cosine similarity.
Result
  • Shipped a working semantic-search demo for Alice in Wonderland that returns ranked sentence matches instead of keyword hits.
  • Kept the site embed usable with warm-up status, inline similarity bars, and an open-in-new-tab fallback for a larger view.