Configure Queries

When you add data to a corpus, the Query tab lets you experiment with different semantic search, summarization, and chat options. Whether you want to retrieve relevant information, generate summaries grounded in facts with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), or engage in conversational interactions, explore these options and configurations to find the optimal settings for your applications.

Search Your Data

The Query tab provides the following application types for search and retrieval:

1. Semantic search: Perform semantic searches based on natural language queries. Vectara's advanced algorithms understand the meaning and context of your queries, enabling accurate and relevant search results.
2. Summary: Extending the Semantic Search functionality, this option uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide concise summaries in response to your queries. This can be particularly useful when you need an overview of the relevant information within your data.
3. Chat: Engage in conversational interactions with your data. This can be particularly useful when you need to ask follow-up questions, clarify information, or explore your data in a more interactive manner.
   tip

   Chat leverages the same underlying search and summarization capabilities as the other options, but presents the results in a conversational format, making it easier to maintain context and engage in multi-turn interactions.

Customize the Query Experience

These search options provide different configuration settings to tailor the query experience to your specific needs:

Save query to history

When experimenting with configurations and running queries against a corpus, Vectara lets you log your queries into a query history. This is important for troubleshooting issues, inspecting past queries, and optimizing configurations. By surfacing data like query latency, search results, reranking, and generative response times, users can better understand how to fine-tune Vectara to meet their business goals.

View the history of query

1. Ask questions of your data with Send query.
2. Select View query history to review a table of past queries executed against your corpus.
3. Select a query from the table to view its detailed configuration, execution flow, and results.
4. Use this information to optimize your configuration and submit a new query.

Configure retrieval

The Retrieval configuration lets you enable hybrid search by adjusting the lexical_interpolation value, also known as lambda, which is a balance between neural search and keyword search.

The reranking option lets you rerank orders of search results also use the Maximum Marginal Relevance (MMR) Reranker with a diversity factor to reduce bias.

The result context option lets you configure the number of sentences or characters before and after the matched text. If you use the number of characters, Vectara captures the entire sentence that contains the captured characters.

Configure generation

The Generation section shows the LLM and prompt template used and lets you configure the Language and Summarization options for the query:

Configure evaluation

The Factual Consistency Score automatically evaluates and detects hallucinations in generated output. This calibrated score can range from 0.0 to 1.0. A higher score indicates a greater probability of being factually accurate, while a lower score indicates a greater probability of hallucinations.

Configure search filters

Select the Filters tab to enter a filter expression or select filter attributes to further refine your search results. We provide some syntax examples in the drawer.