Pair Search — GovTech's AI Research Engine for Singapore's Parliamentary and Legal Archives

Singapore's GovTech, through its experimental Open Government Products (OGP) team, built Pair Search in collaboration with the Parliament of Singapore. It is a hybrid search engine combining BM25 keyword search with e5 semantic embeddings, reranked with ColBERTv2 and served on Vespa.ai, indexing more than 30,000 Hansard parliamentary debate reports dating back to 1955, alongside Supreme Court judgments and current legislation.
Soft-launched in early 2024 out of the "Hack for Public Good" hackathon, the tool is used by policy officers at the Ministry of Law, the Ministry of Communications and Information, the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Home Affairs to check legislative precedent and prior parliamentary positions before drafting policy. Early usage data reported by GovTech and corroborated by independent press show around 150 daily active users and 200 daily searches during the soft-launch period, with 84% of users who clicked a result finding what they needed within the first 10 results.
This remains an explicitly labelled pilot. No independent evaluation of downstream policy-drafting quality or time savings has yet been published, and a later, widely repeated figure of roughly 2,700 total users could not be independently verified in source checking, so it is excluded from this record.

Read the full analysis: https://www.hack.gov.sg/2024/pairsearch/