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Vectara

Vectara is a GenAI platform for developers. It provides a simple API to build Grounded Generation (aka Retrieval-augmented-generation or RAG) applications.

In the notebook, we’ll demo the SelfQueryRetriever wrapped around a Vectara vector store.

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 ingest 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’ll need to have these 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.query_constructor.base import AttributeInfo
from langchain.embeddings import FakeEmbeddings
from langchain.llms import OpenAI
from langchain.retrievers.self_query.base import SelfQueryRetriever
from langchain.schema import Document
from langchain.vectorstores import Vectara
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.llms import OpenAI
from langchain.retrievers.self_query.base import SelfQueryRetriever

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.get_relevant_documents("What are some movies about dinosaurs")
/Users/ofer/dev/langchain/libs/langchain/langchain/chains/llm.py:278: UserWarning: The predict_and_parse method is deprecated, instead pass an output parser directly to LLMChain.
  warnings.warn(
query='dinosaur' filter=None limit=None
[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='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'}),
 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 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'})]
# This example only specifies a filter
retriever.get_relevant_documents("I want to watch a movie rated higher than 8.5")
query=' ' filter=Comparison(comparator=<Comparator.GT: 'gt'>, attribute='rating', value=8.5) limit=None
[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'}),
 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'})]
# This example specifies a query and a filter
retriever.get_relevant_documents("Has Greta Gerwig directed any movies about women")
query='women' filter=Comparison(comparator=<Comparator.EQ: 'eq'>, attribute='director', value='Greta Gerwig') limit=None
[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.get_relevant_documents(
    "What's a highly rated (above 8.5) science fiction film?"
)
query=' ' filter=Operation(operator=<Operator.AND: 'and'>, arguments=[Comparison(comparator=<Comparator.GTE: 'gte'>, attribute='rating', value=8.5), Comparison(comparator=<Comparator.EQ: 'eq'>, attribute='genre', value='science fiction')]) limit=None
[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.get_relevant_documents(
    "What's a movie after 1990 but before 2005 that's all about toys, and preferably is animated"
)
query='toys' filter=Operation(operator=<Operator.AND: 'and'>, arguments=[Comparison(comparator=<Comparator.GT: 'gt'>, attribute='year', value=1990), Comparison(comparator=<Comparator.LT: 'lt'>, attribute='year', value=2005), Comparison(comparator=<Comparator.EQ: 'eq'>, attribute='genre', value='animated')]) limit=None
[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.get_relevant_documents("what are two movies about dinosaurs")
query='dinosaur' filter=None limit=2
[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'})]