We'll focus on the extractive QA pipeline analysis here. If your pipeline didn't live up to your expectations, you could consider optimizing the PreProcessor, Retriever, or Reader nodes.

Optimizing the Splitter

Spliters, like DocumentSplitter, split your documents into smaller ones. To improve its performance, you can change the value of the split_length parameter. It's best to set this parameter to a value between 200 and 500 words. This is because there is a limit on the number of words an embedding retriever can process. The exact number depends on the model you use for your retriever, but once the document length passes that number, it cuts off the rest of the document.

Optimizing the Retriever

When evaluating the retriever, it's good to start with OpenSearchBM25Retriever, as it's the standard. Here's what you can try:

Increase the number of documents the retriever returns. Use the top_k parameter to do that. This will increase the chances that the retriever sees a document containing the right answer. Doing this, though, slows down the search system as the reader must then check more documents.
Replace the OpenSearchBM25Retriever with OpenSearchEmbeddingRetriever. Have a look at the Models for Information Retrieval and check if any of them outperforms the BM25 retriever.
Combine the output of both BM25Retriever and EmbeddingRetriever. You can do this with the DocumentJoiner component. If you use DocumentJoiner, specify the number of documents it should return. By default, it returns all unique documents from the combined outputs of both retrievers. You must remember, though, that the more documents the reader has to go through, the slower the search is.
- To control the number of documents DocumentJoiner returns, use top_k in this node.
- You also need to choose the join_mode. This controls how the two lists of results are combined. We recommend reciprocal_rank_fusion. The other options you can try are concatenate, merge, and distribution_based_rank_fusion. The join_mode parameter only affects the reader results if you set top_k as, by default, DocumentJoiner passes all documents to the reader.

A YAML template for a pipeline with combined retrievers

components:
  bm25_retriever: # Selects the most similar documents from the document store
    type: haystack_integrations.components.retrievers.opensearch.bm25_retriever.OpenSearchBM25Retriever
    init_parameters:
      document_store:
        type: haystack_integrations.document_stores.opensearch.document_store.OpenSearchDocumentStore
        init_parameters:
          use_ssl: True
          verify_certs: False
          hosts:
            - ${OPENSEARCH_HOST}
          http_auth:
            - "${OPENSEARCH_USER}"
            - "${OPENSEARCH_PASSWORD}"
          embedding_dim: 768
          similarity: cosine
      top_k: 20 # The number of results to return

  query_embedder:
    type: haystack.components.embedders.sentence_transformers_text_embedder.SentenceTransformersTextEmbedder
    init_parameters:
      model: "intfloat/e5-base-v2"

  embedding_retriever: # Selects the most similar documents from the document store
    type: haystack_integrations.components.retrievers.opensearch.embedding_retriever.OpenSearchEmbeddingRetriever
    init_parameters:
      document_store:
        type: haystack_integrations.document_stores.opensearch.document_store.OpenSearchDocumentStore
        init_parameters:
          use_ssl: True
          verify_certs: False
          hosts:
            - ${OPENSEARCH_HOST}
          http_auth:
            - "${OPENSEARCH_USER}"
            - "${OPENSEARCH_PASSWORD}"
          embedding_dim: 768
          similarity: cosine
      top_k: 20 # The number of results to return

  document_joiner:
    type: haystack.components.joiners.document_joiner.DocumentJoiner
    init_parameters:
      join_mode: concatenate

  ranker:
    type: haystack.components.rankers.transformers_similarity.TransformersSimilarityRanker
    init_parameters:
      model: "intfloat/simlm-msmarco-reranker"
      top_k: 10
      model_kwargs:
        torch_dtype: "torch.float16"

  reader:
    type: haystack.components.readers.extractive.ExtractiveReader
    init_parameters:
      answers_per_seq: 20
      calibration_factor: 1.0
      max_seq_length: 384
      model: "deepset/deberta-v3-large-squad2"
      model_kwargs:
        torch_dtype: "torch.float16"
      no_answer: false
      top_k: 10

connections:  # Defines how the components are connected
- sender: bm25_retriever.documents
  receiver: document_joiner.documents
- sender: query_embedder.embedding
  receiver: embedding_retriever.query_embedding
- sender: embedding_retriever.documents
  receiver: document_joiner.documents
- sender: document_joiner.documents
  receiver: ranker.documents
- sender: ranker.documents
  receiver: reader.documents

max_loops_allowed: 100

inputs:  # Define the inputs for your pipeline
  query:  # These components will receive the query as input
  - "bm25_retriever.query"
  - "query_embedder.text"
  - "ranker.query"
  - "reader.query"

  filters:  # These components will receive a potential query filter as input
  - "bm25_retriever.filters"
  - "embedding_retriever.filters"

outputs:  # Defines the output of your pipeline
  documents: "ranker.documents"  # The output of the pipeline is the retrieved documents
  answers: "reader.answers"  # The output of the pipeline is the extracted answers

Optimizing the Reader

Finding the Right Model

Metrics are an important indicator of your pipeline's performance, but you should also look into the predictions and let other users test your pipeline to get a better understanding of its weaknesses. To get an idea of what metric values you can achieve, check the metrics for state-of-the-art models on Hugging Face. Make sure you're checking the models trained on question answering datasets. Ideally, you should find a dataset that closely mirrors the one you're evaluating in deepset Cloud.

For example, to find models trained on a particular dataset in Hugging Face, go to Datasets>Tasks and choose question-answering under the Natural Language Processing category.

When you click a particular dataset, you can see its details and all the models trained on it. You can then check the model cards for performance benchmarks.

Try different reader models. For more guidance, see Models for Question Answering.

When choosing a model, remember that larger models usually perform better but are slower than smaller ones. You must decide on a balance between reader accuracy and search latency that you're comfortable with.

Fine-Tuning the Reader Model

If you find that none of the available models perform well enough, you can always fine-tune a model. To do that, you need to collect and annotate data. Our experience is that collecting feedback in deepset Cloud doesn't boost the reader performance as much as annotated data.

Once you have all the data, fine-tune the best-performing reader models you tried in the previous steps with the data you collected.

Reducing Duplicate Answers

If your search returns duplicate answers coming from overlapping documents, try reducing the split_overlap value of DocumentSplitter to a value around or below 10.