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RAG integration revolutionized search with LLM, boosting dynamic retrieval. Within the implementation of a RAG application system, a pivotal factor governing its efficiency and performance lies in the determination of the optimal chunk size.

How does one identify the most effective chunk size for seamless and efficient retrieval? This is precisely where the comprehensive assessment provided by the LlamaIndex Response Evaluation tool becomes invaluable.

In this article, we will provide a comprehensive walkthrough, enabling you to discern the ideal chunk size through the powerful features of LlamaIndex’s Response Evaluation module. 

 

Tune in to Co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex, Jerry Liu, and learn all about LLMs, RAG, fine-tuning and more!

 

Why Chunk Size Matters in the RAG Application System?

Selecting the appropriate chunk size is a crucial determination that holds sway over the effectiveness and precision of a RAG application system in various ways:

Pertinence and Detail

Opting for a smaller chunk size, such as 256, results in more detailed segments. However, this heightened detail brings the potential risk that pivotal information might not be included in the most retrieved segments.

On the contrary, a chunk size of 512 is likely to encompass all vital information within the leading chunks, ensuring that responses to inquiries are readily accessible. To navigate this challenge, we will employ the faithfulness and relevance metrics.

These metrics gauge the absence of ‘hallucinations’ and the ‘relevancy’ of responses concerning the query and the contexts retrieved, respectively. 

 

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Generation Time for Responses

With an increase in the chunk size, the volume of information directed into the LLM for generating a response also increases. While this can guarantee a more comprehensive context, it might potentially decelerate the system. Ensuring that the added depth doesn’t compromise the system’s responsiveness is pivotal.

Ultimately, finding the ideal chunk size boils down to achieving a delicate equilibrium. Capturing all crucial information while maintaining operational speed It’s essential to conduct comprehensive testing with different sizes to discover a setup that aligns with the unique use case and dataset requirements. 

 

 

All About Application Evaluation

The discussion surrounding evaluation in the field of NLP has been contentious, particularly with the advancements in NLP methodologies.

Traditional evaluation techniques like BLEU or F1 are now unreliable for assessing models because they have limited correspondence with human evaluations. As a result, the landscape of evaluation practices continues to shift, emphasizing the need for cautious application. 

In this blog, our focus will be on configuring the GPT-3.5-turbo model to serve as the central tool for evaluating the responses in our experiment.

To facilitate this, we establish two key evaluators, the faithfulness evaluator, and the relevance evaluator, utilizing the service context. This approach aligns with the evolving standards of LLM evaluation, reflecting the need for more sophisticated and reliable evaluation mechanisms.

Faithfulness evaluator: This evaluator is instrumental in determining whether the response was artificially generated and checks if the response from a query engine corresponds with any source nodes. 

Relevancy evaluator: This evaluator is crucial for gauging whether the query was effectively addressed by the response and examines whether the response, combined with source nodes, matches the query. 

In order to determine the appropriate chunk size, we will calculate metrics such as average response time, average faithfulness, and average relevancy across different chunk sizes.  

 

 

Downloading Dataset 

We will be using the IRS armed forces tax guide for this experiment. 

  • mkdir is used to make a folder. Here we are making a folder named dataset in the root directory. 
  • wget command is used for non-interactive downloading of files from the web. It allows users to retrieve content from web servers, supporting various protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP. 

 

 

 

Load Dataset

  • SimpleDirectoryReader class will help us to load all the files in the dataset directory. 
  • document[0:10] represents that we will only be loading the first 10 pages of the file for the sake of simplicity. 

 

 

Defining the Question Bank 

These questions will help us to evaluate metrics for different chunk sizes. 

 

 

Establishing Evaluators  

This code initializes an OpenAI language model (GPT-3.5-turbo) with temperature=0 settings and instantiates evaluators for measuring faithfulness and relevancy, utilizing the ServiceContext module with default configurations. 

 

 

Main Evaluator Method 

We will be evaluating each chunk size based on 3 metrics. 

  1. Average Response Time 
  2. Average Faithfulness 
  3. Average Relevancy

 

Read this blog about Orchestation Framework

 

  • The function evaluator takes two parameters, chunkSize and questionBank. 
  • It first initializes an OpenAI language model (llm) with the model set to GPT-3.5-turbo. 
  • Then, it creates a serviceContext using the ServiceContext.from_defaults method, specifying the language model (llm) and the chunk size (chunkSize). 
  • The function uses the VectorStoreIndex.from_documents method to create a vector index from a set of documents, with the service context specified. 
  • It builds a query engine (queryEngine) from the vector index. 
  • The total number of questions in the question bank is determined and stored in the variable totalQuestions. 

Next, the function initializes variables for tracking various metrics: 

  • totalResponseTime: Tracks the cumulative response time for all questions. 
  • totalFaithfulness: Tracks the cumulative faithfulness score for all questions. 
  • totalRelevancy: Tracks the cumulative relevancy score for all questions. 
  • It records the start time before querying the queryEngine for a response to the current question. 
  • It calculates the elapsed time for the query by subtracting the start time from the current time. 
  • The function evaluates the faithfulness of the response using faithfulnessLLM.evaluate_response and stores the result in the faithfulnessResult variable. 
  • Similarly, it evaluates the relevancy of the response using relevancyLLM.evaluate_response and stores the result in the relevancyResult variable. 
  • The function accumulates the elapsed time, faithfulness result, and relevancy result in their respective total variables. 
  • After evaluating all the questions, the function computes the averages 

 

 

 

Testing Different Chunk Sizes

To find out the best chunk size for our data, we have defined a list of chunk sizes then we will traverse through the list of chunk sizes and find out the average response time, average faithfulness, and average relevance with the help of the evaluator method.

After this, we will convert our data list into a data frame with the help of Pandas DataFrame class to view it in a fine manner.

 

 

From the illustration, it is evident that the chunk size of 128 exhibits the highest average faithfulness and relevancy while maintaining the second-lowest average response time. 

Use LlamaIndex to Construct a RAG Application System 

Identifying the best chunk size for a RAG system depends on a combination of intuition and empirical data. By utilizing LlamaIndex’s Response Evaluation module, we can experiment with different sizes and make well-informed decisions.

When constructing a RAG application system, it is crucial to remember that the chunk size plays a pivotal role. Therefore, it is essential to invest the necessary time to thoroughly evaluate and fine-tune the chunk size for optimal outcomes. 

 

You can find the complete code here