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Preparing the documents and vector database

Over the next few exercises, you'll build a full RAG workflow to have a conversation with a PDF document containing the paper, RAG VS Fine-Tuning: Pipelines, Tradeoffs, and a Case Study on Agriculture by Balaguer et al. (2024). This works by splitting the documents into chunks, storing them in a vector database, defining a prompt to connect the retrieved documents and user input, and building a retrieval chain for the LLM to access this external data.

In this exercise, you'll prepare the document for storage and ingest them into a Chroma vector database. You'll use a RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter to chunk the PDF, and ingest them into a Chroma vector database using an OpenAI embeddings function. As with the rest of the course, you don't need to provide your own OpenAI API key.

The following classes have already been imported for you: RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter, Chroma, and OpenAIEmbeddings.

This exercise is part of the course

Developing LLM Applications with LangChain

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Exercise instructions

  • Split the documents in data using a RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter with a chunk_size of 300 and chunk_overlap of 50.
  • Use the .from_documents() method to embed and ingest the documents into a Chroma vector database with the provided OpenAI embeddings function.
  • Configure vectorstore into a retriever object that returns the top 3 documents for use in the final RAG chain.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

loader = PyPDFLoader('rag_vs_fine_tuning.pdf')
data = loader.load()

# Split the document using RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter
splitter = RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter(
    chunk_size=____,
    chunk_overlap=____)
docs = splitter.split_documents(data) 

# Embed the documents in a persistent Chroma vector database
embedding_function = OpenAIEmbeddings(api_key='', model='text-embedding-3-small')
vectorstore = Chroma.____(
    docs,
    embedding=embedding_function,
    persist_directory=os.getcwd()
)

# Configure the vector store as a retriever
retriever = vectorstore.as_retriever(
    search_type="similarity",
    search_kwargs={"k": ____}
)
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