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How to construct filters

Prerequisites

This guide assumes familiarity with the following:

We may want to do query analysis to extract filters to pass into retrievers. One way we ask the LLM to represent these filters is as a Zod schema. There is then the issue of converting that Zod schema into a filter that can be passed into a retriever.

This can be done manually, but LangChain also provides some “Translators” that are able to translate from a common syntax into filters specific to each retriever. Here, we will cover how to use those translators.

Setup

Install dependencies

yarn add zod

In this example, year and author are both attributes to filter on.

import { z } from "zod";

const searchSchema = z.object({
query: z.string(),
startYear: z.number().optional(),
author: z.string().optional(),
});

const searchQuery: z.infer<typeof searchSchema> = {
query: "RAG",
startYear: 2022,
author: "LangChain",
};
import { Comparison, Comparator } from "langchain/chains/query_constructor/ir";

function constructComparisons(
query: z.infer<typeof searchSchema>
): Comparison[] {
const comparisons: Comparison[] = [];
if (query.startYear !== undefined) {
comparisons.push(
new Comparison("gt" as Comparator, "start_year", query.startYear)
);
}
if (query.author !== undefined) {
comparisons.push(
new Comparison("eq" as Comparator, "author", query.author)
);
}
return comparisons;
}

const comparisons = constructComparisons(searchQuery);
import { Operation, Operator } from "langchain/chains/query_constructor/ir";

const _filter = new Operation("and" as Operator, comparisons);
import { ChromaTranslator } from "langchain/retrievers/self_query/chroma";

new ChromaTranslator().visitOperation(_filter);
{
"$and": [
{ start_year: { "$gt": 2022 } },
{ author: { "$eq": "LangChain" } }
]
}

Next steps

You’ve now learned how to create a specific filter from an arbitrary query.

Next, check out some of the other query analysis guides in this section, like how to use few-shotting to improve performance.


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