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by bob1029 332 days ago
I still contend that what most people want is traditional full text search, not another layer of black box weirdness behind the LLM.

You already have a model with incredibly powerful semantic understanding. Why do we need the document store to also be a smartass? The model can project multiple OR clauses into the search term based upon its interpretation of the context.

If you are using something like Lucene, queries are extremely fast and the maximum # of supported documents in one index far exceeds what AWS says they can support here.

1 comments

Keyword alone sucks for negation. Searching a set of patient documents for “Which of my patients has COPD?” to get a set of responses that states “COPD not indicated” will not endear you to the physician using your tool. Hybrid (keyword + semantic) is much more all-encompassing.
Forwarding the users query directly to the document store seems ridiculous to me. The whole point is for the LLM to interpret the context and issue multiple targeted queries based upon the interpretation(s) arrived at.

The LLM is the semantic part. FTS is the keyword part. This is the hybrid you're looking for.

Sometimes you are searching for supporting evidence that is semantically related. COPD was just an example, you won’t get a direct keyword match if the Physician is searching for lung disease.