Custom Dimensions

Custom Dimensions

Custom dimensions are a fixed set of additional "dimensions" that contain user-defined numerical values and are stored in addition to the dimensions that Vectara automatically extracts and stores from the text. At query time, users can use these custom dimensions to increase or decrease the resulting score dynamically, query by query.

For example, let's say we want to add a custom dimension to boost posts from a forum based on how many "upvotes" it has received. We can create the corpus with a "votes" custom dimension as follows:

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${JWT_TOKEN}" \
  -H "customer-id: ${CUSTOMER_ID}" \
  https://api.vectara.io:443/v1/create-corpus \
  -d @- <<END;
{
  "corpus":
    {
      "name": "Acme Forums",
      "description": "Contents of the Acme Forum",
      "custom_dimensions": [
        {
            "name": "votes",
            "description": "Log of the number of votes received by this post",
            "serving_default": 0.0,
            "indexing_default": 0.0
        }
      ]
    }
}
END

You can then attach the value of a custom dimension as follows:

{
    "documentId": "237a8b63-2826-4ee1-8d83-14c2451a3357",
    "parts": [
        {
            "context": "...",
            "text": "Yesterday I woke up and observed a rainbow out of my window.",
            "custom_dims": [{
                "name": "votes",
                "value": 1.235
            }]
        }
    ]
}

And then to boost documents based on the value of these custom dimensions, you can apply a query as follows:

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${JWT_TOKEN}" \
  -H "customer-id: ${CUSTOMER_ID}" \
  https://api.vectara.io:443/v1/query \
  -d @- <<END;
{
  "query": [
    { "query": "When was the last time you saw a rainbow?",
      "num_results": 5,
      "corpus_key": [{
          "customer_id": ${CUSTOMER_ID},
          "corpus_id": ${CORPUS_ID},
          "dim": [{
              "name": "votes",
              "value": 0.01
          }]
      }]
    }
  ]
}
END