Building Semantic Search Applications with Langchain and ChromaDB: An Overview
In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, one of the most exciting developments is the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs). These models, trained on vast amounts of text data, could understand, and generate human-like text, opening a plethora of possibilities in various fields. One such application is semantic search, which aims to understand the intent behind a user’s query and provide more relevant results.
Semantic search is a type of search that goes beyond keyword matching to understand the meaning of the query and the content being searched. This allows for more relevant and accurate search results.
One way to perform semantic search is to use a large language model (LLM) like OpenAI’s GPT-3. LLMs are trained on massive amounts of text data and can be used to generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way.
Introduction to Langchain
Langchain is an innovative platform that harnesses the full potential of LLMs1. It provides a sophisticated framework to interact with LLMs, external data sources, prompts, and User Interfaces1. The main value propositions of Langchain are its components and off-the-shelf chains1. Components are modular abstractions needed to work with language models and are easy to use for many LLM use cases1. Off-the-shelf chains are structured assemblies of various components and modules designed to accomplish specific tasks1.
LLMs can also be used to perform semantic search by embedding the text of a query and the content being searched into a vector space. This allows for similarity searches to be performed on the embeddings, which can be used to identify documents that are semantically similar to the query.
Langchain is a framework for developing applications powered by language models. It can be used to connect to external data sources and LLMs. One use case for Langchain is to build semantic search applications. This can be done by using Langchain to store document embeddings in a vector database and then using OpenAI’s LLMs to perform similarity search on the embeddings.
Vector Databases in Semantic Search
In addition to Langchain, semantic search applications also require a vector storage database to store the data they will retrieve later on. One such database is ChromaDB, which is used as a document store in our application pipeline2.
ChromaDB is an open-source vector database that can be used to store document embeddings. It is a good choice for storing document embeddings because it is fast and scalable.
Building an Application Pipeline with OpenAI API and ChromaDB
The process of building an application pipeline involves several steps. First, we need to load user documents for vectorization and storage purposes. LangChain provides easy-to-use APIs for this process. The documents are then transformed into fixed chunk lengths using text splitters for efficient storage.
To build a semantic search application using Langchain and ChromaDB, you would first need to create a Langchain pipeline. This pipeline would be responsible for loading the document embeddings from ChromaDB, performing similarity search on the embeddings using OpenAI’s LLMs, and returning the most relevant results.
Once you have created the Langchain pipeline, you can deploy it to a production environment. This can be done by deploying the pipeline to a cloud-based platform like Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services.
Once the pipeline is deployed, you can start using it to perform semantic search on your documents. To do this, you would simply need to send a request to the pipeline with the query that you want to search. The pipeline would then return the most relevant results.
Here is an example of how to build a semantic search application using Langchain and ChromaDB:
This is just a simple example, and there are many other ways to build semantic search applications using Langchain and ChromaDB. For more information, please see the Langchain documentation and the ChromaDB documentation.
Benefits of using Langchain and ChromaDB for semantic search
There are several benefits to using Langchain and ChromaDB for semantic search:
- Accuracy: Langchain and ChromaDB can be used to build very accurate semantic search applications. This is because LLMs like GPT-3 are able to understand the meaning of text and identify documents that are semantically similar to a query.
- Scalability: Langchain and ChromaDB are both scalable solutions. This means that they can be used to build semantic search applications that can handle large volumes of data.
- Flexibility: Langchain and ChromaDB are both flexible solutions. This means that they can be used to build semantic search applications for a variety of different use cases.
Use cases for semantic search
Semantic search can be used for a variety of different use cases, including:
- Search engines: Semantic search can be used to improve the accuracy and relevance of search results.
- Recommendation systems: Semantic search can be used to recommend products, articles, and other content to users.
- Question answering systems: Semantic search can be used to answer user questions in a comprehensive and informative way.
- Chatbots: Semantic search can be used to build chatbots that can understand and respond to user queries in a natural way.
Langchain and ChromaDB are powerful tools that can be used to build semantic search applications. Semantic search applications can be used to improve the accuracy and relevance of search results, recommend products and content to users, answer user questions, and build chatbots that can understand and respond to user queries in.
