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For general-purpose text retrieval, we recommend full-text search: it runs over your raw text fields with BM25 ranking and Lucene query syntax.pinecone-sparse-english-v0 is the right choice for workflows that need a learned sparse-vector representation — for example, when your application already produces sparse vectors upstream of Pinecone, or when you’re pairing it with a dense encoder in a single-index hybrid workflow on the vector API.You can call the embed operation through Pinecone Inference to turn text into vectors without writing to an index. That differs from upsert_records on an index with integrated embedding, where each request embeds and stores records in one step. To see how embedding consumption appears in billing and usage reports, see Embedding tokens.
Built on the innovations of the DeepImpact architecture, the model directly estimates the lexical importance of tokens by leveraging their context, unlike traditional retrieval models like BM25, which rely solely on term frequency. The model outperforms BM25 by up to 44% (average 23%) NDCG@10 on Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Deep Learning Tracks and up to 24% (8% on average) on BEIR. For more information see our blog post on cascading retrievalWhen using the model to generate embeddings directly, you must specify the input_type as either query or passage. When creating an index with integrated embedding, input_type defaults to query for reads and passage for writes. Optionally, you can:
  • Return the string tokens using "return_tokens": true.
  • Raise the max input tokens limit from the default of 512 to the maximum of 2048 using "max_tokens_per_sequence": 2048.
  • Return an error when the input exceeds max_tokens_per_sequence using "truncate": "NONE".

Installation

Create index

Embed & upsert

Query

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