The Prospera Labs Flexi-Match Knowledge Base is a flexible system that allows your agent to access a large database of knowledge. The Knowledge Base can be used for multiple different use-cases - from answering questions about products and services, through to analyzing documents or situations against best-practices that have been uploaded.

Loading In Knowledge

There are many different ways to load in knowledge to your agent, which will depend a lot on the different use-cases for your agent.

Uploading Documents

One of the simplest ways to load in information is to import documents prepared in conventional Office software, such as PDF or Microsoft Word documents.

You can upload documents by pressing the Import Document button in the top right.

This will bring you to the bulk import page where you can then upload documents either by dragging and dropping, or by pressing the upload button and selecting the files.

Uploading Web Pages

You can similarly import information from web pages. This is done in the Imported Webpage menu.

Then press the “Import Web Page URL” button.

That will bring you to this page. Its a bit terse but you can paste in the URL here:

https://prosperalabs.ai/

How It Works

Here we will explain the basic process of how the knowledge base works in the default Q&A setup.

Document Ingestion

When any type of document is taken into the system, we go through the following process:

1. Convert into raw text

2. Break the text into small sections based on the semantics and headers of the document

3. For each section, we generate a list of questions that the section of text answers. E.g. almost like Jeopardy, we are going backwards from the answer (contained in the document) to questions

4. We fetch the embedding vector for each of the questions

5. Create a summary of the entire document, referred to as the “Qualifying Text” internally because it helps qualify whether a particular knowledge chunk is relevant

6. Write the knowledge chunks out to the database

Querying

When you query the knowledge base, the system goes through the following steps:

1. The original raw query is transformed into a clean query. For the default knowledge base configuration, this means taking an ambiguous sentence, like location of food and turning it into the format of a question, such as Where is the food located? so that the text matches the format of the questions that were generated by the ingestion engine

2. We lookup the embedding vector for the transformed query

3. We use the embedding vector to perform a query on the knowledge base and find the top K knowledge chunks whose matching text (a.k.a the generated question) is the closest to the query text

4. We use a reranking algorithm to rerank the matched knowledge chunks against the query

5. We discard all except the top 5 matching knowledge chunks

6. The matching knowledge chunks are returned. For your standard AI Agents, these matching knowledge chunks are then fed into the conversation history for the agent as a tool-result, which the agent can then use to formulate and write its response

Customizing

The knowledge base can be connected to many different sources of data, combining them together into a homogenous knowledge system. Sources of data include documents and web-pages that you import through the user interface. But may also include custom data schemas that you have created yourself, containing information that the bot has extracted from conversations (this allows the agent to have a ‘memory’ in-between multiple sessions). Eventually we may even allow third-party API services to become sources of data for the knowledge base.

Types of smart chains for knowledge base customization

Each source of data can be customized independently. There are six different smart-chains that you can modify to change the behavior of the knowledge base. Those are:

1. Chunker chain - The chunker chain is responsible for taking a large, long document and breaking it up into individual sections of content. The default version just breaks a document into sections based on format meaning, e.g. using the existing headers and paragraphs as section breaks

2. Matching Text Chain - The matching text chain is responsible for taking a chunk of content, and transforming them into bits of text that are embedded and matched against when querying. The default form that matching texts take are questions, e.g. “What kind of food is available in Alaska?”. However, its not necessary and some use-cases of the knowledge base require querying based on other formats of text.

3. Qualifying Text Chain - The qualifying text chain is responsible for taking the chunk of content, along with the document as a whole, and creating a summary of the document as a whole along with how the text of the specific knowledge chunk fits into that larger document. E.g. if the whole document is on the subject of “Arctic Cuisine”, then the qualifying text might be “The section describes Alaskan cuisine within the context of a larger document describing various arctic cuisines”. The qualifying text is used to provide contextual information so that the LLM can correctly interpret the content of the knowledge chunk, which loses some meaning when separated from the larger document

4. Query Transformation Chain - The query transformation chain is responsible for taking the query provided by the user, which might take a variety of different forms, and transform it into the same format that is produced by the Matching Text Chain. By default the matching texts take the format of a question, so the default query transformation chain is designed to take whatever you type in and transform it also into a question. E.g. it might take an abstract bit of text like “location of food” and turn it into a proper question format of “Where can the food be found?”

5. Reranking Chain - The reranking chain is responsible for taking knowledge chunks that have been returned by the core Knowledge Base, and then using algorithms to assign a score between 0 and 1 as to how well the given knowledge chunk matches the query. By default, that means the reranking system is effectively responsible for determining if a given knowledge chunk actually answers the question provided by the user.

6. Filtering Chain - The final filtering chain is responsible for removing any knowledge chunks that should not be returned. The filtering chain sets a cut-off for how good the match and rerank scores need to be in order for the knowledge chunks to be returned at all. In many situations, it’s better for the database not to return anything if the knowledge chunks it found do not match closely enough the query provided by the user. So the filtering chain is where you can customize the business logic. The default filtering chain sets a cutoff for both the match score and the rerank score at 0.5

Pre-made Smart Chains for Knowledge Base

Identity Chains

For each of these smart chains, you can find an “identity” version of the chain that does nothing. Those can be observed if you search for the word “identity” in the smart chains.

These identity chains just pass their input data right on through to their output data.

• Identity Chunker Chain - Keeps the entire content text as a single large block of text without breaking it apart

• Identity Matching Text - Uses the entire content text as the matching text without transforming it

• Identity Qualifying Text - Uses the entire content text as the qualifying text without transforming it

• Identity Query Transformer - Passes through the users query verbatim without transforming it

• Identity Reranker - Assigns the highest rerank score of 1.0 to every knowledge chunk regardless of its contents

• Identity Filterer - Does not actually filter anything and just passes through all of the knowledge chunks through to its output

Premade Document Processing Chains

These are pre-made smart chains designed for processing long-form documents in a default Q&A style database. They can be found by searching for smart-chains with the prefix knowledge_base_document_ in the table view.

• Document Chunker - the default document chunker will take the input text and break it apart into sections based on lines and semantic and format information. The goal of the default chunker is to try to break apart the document into small sections that are roughly analogous to what the original author might have viewed the sections of the document to be. E.g. wherever the original author put headers and sections

• Document Qualifying Text - the default document qualifying text smart chain produces a summary of the entire document to use as the qualifying text for all the separate knowledge chunks which resulted from the document.

• Document Matching Text - the default matching text smart chain is designed to take a chunk of content and try to come up with the questions that said content is answering. E.g. it works almost like jeopardy, trying to take an answer and go backwards to the questions. It is designed to generate as many questions as possible for the given knowledge chunk as it can. Additionally, it is supposed to take into account the contextual information provided by the qualifying text.

Premade Query Processing Chains

These are pre-made smart chains that are designed for processing a query for a default Q&A style knowledge base. These pre-made smart chains can be found if you search for the prefix knowledge_base_basic_

• Basic Query Transformer - The basic query transformer is designed for Q&A style knowledge bases. It will take whatever text was provided by the user for the query, e.g. “location of food”, and then turning it into a question in the same format that the Document Matching Text smart chain produces. e.g. “Where can I find the food?” By turning a potentially ambiguous statement into a specific question in the same format as the matching texts, we give our system the best chance of finding the correct knowledge chunks in the database.

• Basic Reranker - The basic reranker (currently not visible in the above screenshot) is designed for Q&A style knowledge bases. It takes the content of the knowledge chunk, and then uses a Ranked Selection smart chain step in order to assess how well the content of the knowledge chunk matches the question. By using the LLM predicted probabilities, it is able to come up with a final ranking score between 0 and 1. The scoring formula is calibrated so that a score of 0.5 corresponds roughly to a document that the model thinks has a 50-50% chance of being the answer to the users question

• Basic Filterer - The basic filterer is designed for Q&A style knowledge bases. It will remove any knowledge chunks that have a match score lower then 0.5 or a rerank score lower then 0.5. This typically only eliminates knowledge chunks that are very very obviously wrong.

Smart Chain Bindings for Knowledge Base

The knowledge base has a different set of bindings for imported web-pages versus imported documents versus other custom data schemas that are loaded in. This allows you to customize how the knowledge base imports documents separately from how it imports web pages, and so on… These bindings can be found by searching for the prefix knowledge_base_imported_ on the smart chains.

The other bindings for the queries are shared for the entire knowledge base. They can be found by searching for the prefix knowledge_base_main_ in the bindings:

These allow you to customize the default way that the knowledge base processes queries.

Identity Bindings

For each of the identity smart chain, there is also an identity binding which points to it. These can be found by searching for identity in the smart chain bindings.

These are some parts of the knowledge base system that are programmatically designed to use the identity smart chains in order to process knowledge base queries in specific situations that require turning off that components. For example, when you do a query in the Knowledge user interface, by default the filtering chain is turned off so that you can see all of the matches, whether they were good or bad.