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Version: 2.0

Default Metadata Filters

A few pieces of metadata expressions are filterable out of the box, including Document ID, Language, and Titles. These filters are very useful in a variety of situations.

Note that you can set up additional fields to filter on by setting up filter attributes on a corpus.

doc.id field​

Each document is assigned a unique identifier at indexing. You can use the doc.id field to retrieve or filter specific Document IDs in your corpus.

Valid filter expressions include something like:

  • doc.id = 'my-document-2023.pdf'
  • doc.id = 'my-document-2022.pdf' OR 'my-document-2023.pdf'
  • doc.id = 'my-document-2023.pdf' AND 'my-document-2024.pdf'

part.lang field​

Each section of a document is evaluated for its language at index time and the part.lang field is added with a 3-character lower-case language code (ISO 639-2). For example, if the section was detected as English, then part.lang would contain eng and if it was detected as German, than part.lang would contain deu.

Valid filter expressions for this would be something like:

  • part.lang = 'eng'
  • part.lang = 'deu'
  • part.lang = 'eng' OR part.lang = 'deu'

part.is_title field​

When adding content, Vectara adds a special Boolean field to indicate whether the field is a title field or not. This is useful for a few different cases depending on how you model your data. For example, some users want to only match on a title field, or never match on a title field, in which case this field can be used to filter.

This field actually uses three value logic: true, false, and unset. We designed it like this to avoid creating too much metadata because customers are billed for metadata, so it is in the customer's interest. Here is how it works using "neural networks" and an example document:

  • Title: "Neural Networks and Deep Learning"

  • Section 1: "Introduction to Neural Networks"

  • Section 2: "Applications of Neural Networks in AI"

  • Section 3: "Conclusion"

  • To filter for only title fields, use part.is_title = true. You get results with "neural networks" in the title, such as "Neural Networks and Deep Learning" in the title.

  • To return only non-title sections, use part.is_title = false. You get results for sections that contain "neural networks" but are not titles, such as "Introduction to Neural Networks," "Applications of Neural Networks in AI," and "Conclusion. You do not get titles with that term in the results.

  • However, not all documents have titles. To include sections with no title set, use part.is_title <> true. You could get a variety of results that do not have specific title designations but they contain the term "neural networks".