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Vectara

Vectara is the trusted GenAI platform that provides an easy-to-use API for document indexing and querying.

Vectara provides an end-to-end managed service for Retrieval Augmented Generation or RAG, which includes:

  1. A way to extract text from document files and chunk them into sentences.
  2. The state-of-the-art Boomerang embeddings model. Each text chunk is encoded into a vector embedding using Boomerang, and stored in the Vectara internal knowledge (vector+text) store
  3. A query service that automatically encodes the query into embedding, and retrieves the most relevant text segments (including support for Hybrid Search and MMR)
  4. An option to create generative summary, based on the retrieved documents, including citations.

See the Vectara API documentation for more information on how to use the API.

This notebook shows how to use SelfQueryRetriever with Vectara.

Setup

You will need a Vectara account to use Vectara with LangChain. To get started, use the following steps (see our quickstart guide):

  1. Sign up for a Vectara account if you don't already have one. Once you have completed your sign up you will have a Vectara customer ID. You can find your customer ID by clicking on your name, on the top-right of the Vectara console window.
  2. Within your account you can create one or more corpora. Each corpus represents an area that stores text data upon ingesting from input documents. To create a corpus, use the "Create Corpus" button. You then provide a name to your corpus as well as a description. Optionally you can define filtering attributes and apply some advanced options. If you click on your created corpus, you can see its name and corpus ID right on the top.
  3. Next you'll need to create API keys to access the corpus. Click on the "Authorization" tab in the corpus view and then the "Create API Key" button. Give your key a name, and choose whether you want query only or query+index for your key. Click "Create" and you now have an active API key. Keep this key confidential.

To use LangChain with Vectara, you need three values: customer ID, corpus ID and api_key. You can provide those to LangChain in two ways:

  1. Include in your environment these three variables: VECTARA_CUSTOMER_ID, VECTARA_CORPUS_ID and VECTARA_API_KEY.

For example, you can set these variables using os.environ and getpass as follows:

import os
import getpass

os.environ["VECTARA_CUSTOMER_ID"] = getpass.getpass("Vectara Customer ID:")
os.environ["VECTARA_CORPUS_ID"] = getpass.getpass("Vectara Corpus ID:")
os.environ["VECTARA_API_KEY"] = getpass.getpass("Vectara API Key:")
  1. Provide them as arguments when creating the Vectara vectorstore object:
vectorstore = Vectara(
                vectara_customer_id=vectara_customer_id,
                vectara_corpus_id=vectara_corpus_id,
                vectara_api_key=vectara_api_key
            )

Note: The self-query retriever requires you to have lark installed (pip install lark).

Connecting to Vectara from LangChain​

In this example, we assume that you've created an account and a corpus, and added your VECTARA_CUSTOMER_ID, VECTARA_CORPUS_ID and VECTARA_API_KEY (created with permissions for both indexing and query) as environment variables.

The corpus has 4 fields defined as metadata for filtering: year, director, rating, and genre

from langchain.chains import ConversationalRetrievalChain
from langchain.chains.query_constructor.base import AttributeInfo
from langchain.retrievers.self_query.base import SelfQueryRetriever
from langchain_community.document_loaders import TextLoader
from langchain_community.embeddings import FakeEmbeddings
from langchain_community.vectorstores import Vectara
from langchain_core.documents import Document
from langchain_openai import OpenAI
from langchain_text_splitters import CharacterTextSplitter
docs = [
    Document(
        page_content="A bunch of scientists bring back dinosaurs and mayhem breaks loose",
        metadata={"year": 1993, "rating": 7.7, "genre": "science fiction"},
    ),
    Document(
        page_content="Leo DiCaprio gets lost in a dream within a dream within a dream within a ...",
        metadata={"year": 2010, "director": "Christopher Nolan", "rating": 8.2},
    ),
    Document(
        page_content="A psychologist / detective gets lost in a series of dreams within dreams within dreams and Inception reused the idea",
        metadata={"year": 2006, "director": "Satoshi Kon", "rating": 8.6},
    ),
    Document(
        page_content="A bunch of normal-sized women are supremely wholesome and some men pine after them",
        metadata={"year": 2019, "director": "Greta Gerwig", "rating": 8.3},
    ),
    Document(
        page_content="Toys come alive and have a blast doing so",
        metadata={"year": 1995, "genre": "animated"},
    ),
    Document(
        page_content="Three men walk into the Zone, three men walk out of the Zone",
        metadata={
            "year": 1979,
            "rating": 9.9,
            "director": "Andrei Tarkovsky",
            "genre": "science fiction",
        },
    ),
]

vectara = Vectara()
for doc in docs:
    vectara.add_texts(
        [doc.page_content],
        embedding=FakeEmbeddings(size=768),
        doc_metadata=doc.metadata,
    )

Creating our self-querying retriever​

Now we can instantiate our retriever. To do this we'll need to provide some information upfront about the metadata fields that our documents support and a short description of the document contents.

from langchain.chains.query_constructor.base import AttributeInfo
from langchain.retrievers.self_query.base import SelfQueryRetriever
from langchain_openai import OpenAI

metadata_field_info = [
    AttributeInfo(
        name="genre",
        description="The genre of the movie",
        type="string or list[string]",
    ),
    AttributeInfo(
        name="year",
        description="The year the movie was released",
        type="integer",
    ),
    AttributeInfo(
        name="director",
        description="The name of the movie director",
        type="string",
    ),
    AttributeInfo(
        name="rating", description="A 1-10 rating for the movie", type="float"
    ),
]
document_content_description = "Brief summary of a movie"
llm = OpenAI(temperature=0)
retriever = SelfQueryRetriever.from_llm(
    llm, vectara, document_content_description, metadata_field_info, verbose=True
)

Testing it out​

And now we can try actually using our retriever!

# This example only specifies a relevant query
retriever.invoke("What are some movies about dinosaurs")
[Document(page_content='A bunch of scientists bring back dinosaurs and mayhem breaks loose', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '66', 'year': '1993', 'rating': '7.7', 'genre': 'science fiction', 'source': 'langchain'}),
 Document(page_content='Toys come alive and have a blast doing so', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '41', 'year': '1995', 'genre': 'animated', 'source': 'langchain'}),
 Document(page_content='A psychologist / detective gets lost in a series of dreams within dreams within dreams and Inception reused the idea', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '116', 'year': '2006', 'director': 'Satoshi Kon', 'rating': '8.6', 'source': 'langchain'}),
 Document(page_content='Leo DiCaprio gets lost in a dream within a dream within a dream within a ...', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '76', 'year': '2010', 'director': 'Christopher Nolan', 'rating': '8.2', 'source': 'langchain'}),
 Document(page_content='A bunch of normal-sized women are supremely wholesome and some men pine after them', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '82', 'year': '2019', 'director': 'Greta Gerwig', 'rating': '8.3', 'source': 'langchain'}),
 Document(page_content='Three men walk into the Zone, three men walk out of the Zone', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '60', 'year': '1979', 'rating': '9.9', 'director': 'Andrei Tarkovsky', 'genre': 'science fiction', 'source': 'langchain'})]
# This example only specifies a filter
retriever.invoke("I want to watch a movie rated higher than 8.5")
[Document(page_content='A psychologist / detective gets lost in a series of dreams within dreams within dreams and Inception reused the idea', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '116', 'year': '2006', 'director': 'Satoshi Kon', 'rating': '8.6', 'source': 'langchain'}),
 Document(page_content='Three men walk into the Zone, three men walk out of the Zone', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '60', 'year': '1979', 'rating': '9.9', 'director': 'Andrei Tarkovsky', 'genre': 'science fiction', 'source': 'langchain'})]
# This example specifies a query and a filter
retriever.invoke("Has Greta Gerwig directed any movies about women")
[Document(page_content='A bunch of normal-sized women are supremely wholesome and some men pine after them', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '82', 'year': '2019', 'director': 'Greta Gerwig', 'rating': '8.3', 'source': 'langchain'})]
# This example specifies a composite filter
retriever.invoke("What's a highly rated (above 8.5) science fiction film?")
[Document(page_content='Three men walk into the Zone, three men walk out of the Zone', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '60', 'year': '1979', 'rating': '9.9', 'director': 'Andrei Tarkovsky', 'genre': 'science fiction', 'source': 'langchain'})]
# This example specifies a query and composite filter
retriever.invoke(
    "What's a movie after 1990 but before 2005 that's all about toys, and preferably is animated"
)
[Document(page_content='Toys come alive and have a blast doing so', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '41', 'year': '1995', 'genre': 'animated', 'source': 'langchain'})]

Filter k​

We can also use the self query retriever to specify k: the number of documents to fetch.

We can do this by passing enable_limit=True to the constructor.

retriever = SelfQueryRetriever.from_llm(
    llm,
    vectara,
    document_content_description,
    metadata_field_info,
    enable_limit=True,
    verbose=True,
)
# This example only specifies a relevant query
retriever.invoke("what are two movies about dinosaurs")
[Document(page_content='A bunch of scientists bring back dinosaurs and mayhem breaks loose', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '66', 'year': '1993', 'rating': '7.7', 'genre': 'science fiction', 'source': 'langchain'}),
 Document(page_content='Toys come alive and have a blast doing so', metadata={'lang': 'eng', 'offset': '0', 'len': '41', 'year': '1995', 'genre': 'animated', 'source': 'langchain'})]

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