Question Answering with MindsDB and OpenAI using MQL

Introduction

In this blog post, we present how to create OpenAI models within MindsDB. In this example, we ask a question to a model and get an answer. The input data is taken from our sample MongoDB database.

Prerequisites

To follow along, you can sign up for an account at cloud.mindsdb.com. Alternatively, head to MindsDB documentation and follow the instructions to manually set up a local instance of MindsDB via Docker or pip.

How to Connect MindsDB to a Database

We use a collection from our MongoDB public demo database, so let’s start by connecting MindsDB to it.

You can use Mongo Compass or Mongo Shell to connect our sample database like this:

test> use mindsdb
mindsdb> db.databases.insertOne({
            'name': 'mongo_demo_db',
            'engine': 'mongodb',
            'connection_args': {
                "host": "mongodb+srv://user:MindsDBUser123!@demo-data-mdb.trzfwvb.mongodb.net/",
                "database": "public"
            }
        })

Tutorial

In this tutorial, we create a predictive model to answer questions in a specified domain.

Now that we’ve connected our database to MindsDB, let’s query the data to be used in the example:

mindsdb> use mongo_demo_db
mongo_demo_db> db.questions.find({}).limit(3)

Here is the output:

{
  _id: '63d01350bbca62e9c77732c0',
  article_title: 'Alessandro_Volta',
  question: 'Was Volta an Italian physicist?',
  true_answer: 'yes'
}
{
  _id: '63d01350bbca62e9c77732c1',
  article_title: 'Alessandro_Volta',
  question: 'Is Volta buried in the city of Pittsburgh?',
  true_answer: 'no'
}
{
  _id: '63d01350bbca62e9c77732c2',
  article_title: 'Alessandro_Volta',
  question: 'Did Volta have a passion for the study of electricity?',
  true_answer: 'yes'
}

Let’s create a model collection to answer all questions from the input dataset:

mongo_demo_db> use mindsdb
mindsdb> db.models.insertOne({
            name: 'question_answering',
            predict: 'answer',
            training_options: {
                        engine: 'openai',
                        prompt_template: 'answer the question of text:{{question}} about text:{{article_title}}'
                }
        })

In practice, the insertOne method triggers MindsDB to generate an AI collection called question_answering that uses the OpenAI integration to predict a field named answer. The model is created inside the default mindsdb project. In MindsDB, projects are a natural way to keep artifacts, such as models or views, separate according to what predictive task they solve. You can learn more about MindsDB projects here.

The training_options key specifies the parameters that this handler requires.

• The engine parameter defines that we use the openai engine.
• The prompt_template parameter conveys the structure of a message that is to be completed with additional text generated by the model.

Follow this instruction to set up the OpenAI integration in MindsDB.

Once the insertOne method has started execution, we can check the status of the creation process with the following query:

mindsdb> db.getCollection('models').find({
            'name': 'question_answering'
        })

It may take a while to register as complete depending on the internet connection. Once the creation is complete, the behavior is the same as with any other AI collection – you can query it either by specifying synthetic data in the actual query:

mindsdb> db.question_answering.find({
            question: 'Was Abraham Lincoln the sixteenth President of the United States?',
            article_title: 'Abraham_Lincoln'
        })

Here is the output data:

{
  answer: 'Yes, Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth President of the United States.',
  question: 'Was Abraham Lincoln the sixteenth President of the United States?',
  article_title: 'Abraham_Lincoln'
}

Or by joining with a collection for batch predictions:

mindsdb> db.question_answering.find(
            {
                'collection': 'mongo_demo_db.questions'
            },
            {
                'question_answering.answer': 'answer',
                'questions.question': 'question',
                'questions.article_title': 'article_title'
            }
        ).limit(3)

Here is the output data:

{
  answer: 'Yes, Volta was an Italian physicist.',
  question: 'Was Volta an Italian physicist?',
  article_title: 'Alessandro_Volta'
}
{
  answer: 'No, Volta is not buried in the city of Pittsburgh.',
  question: 'Is Volta buried in the city of Pittsburgh?',
  article_title: 'Alessandro_Volta'
}
{
  answer: 'Yes, Volta had a passion for the study of electricity. He was fascinated by the',
  question: 'Did Volta have a passion for the study of electricity?',
  article_title: 'Alessandro_Volta'
}

The questions collection is used to make batch predictions. Upon joining the question_answering model with the questions collection, the model uses all values from the article_title and question fields.

Leverage the NLP Capabilities with MindsDB

By integrating databases and OpenAI using MindsDB, developers can easily extract insights from text data with just a few SQL commands. These powerful natural language processing (NLP) models are capable of answering questions with or without context and completing general prompts.

Furthermore, these models are powered by large pre-trained language models from OpenAI, so there is no need for manual development work. Ultimately, this provides developers with an easy way to incorporate powerful NLP capabilities into their applications while saving time and resources compared to traditional ML development pipelines and methods. All in all, MindsDB makes it possible for developers to harness the power of OpenAI efficiently!

MindsDB is now the fastest-growing open-source applied machine-learning platform in the world. Its community continues to contribute to more than 70 data-source and ML-framework integrations. Stay tuned for the upcoming features - including more control over the interface parameters and fine-tuning models directly from MindsDB!

Experiment with OpenAI models within MindsDB and unlock the ML capability over your data in minutes. Remember to sign-up for a free demo account and follow the tutorials, perhaps this time using your data.

Finally, if MindsDB’s vision to democratize ML sounds exciting, head to our community Slack, where you can get help and find people to chat about using other available data sources, ML frameworks, or writing a handler to bring your own!

Follow our introduction to MindsDB’s OpenAI integration here. Also, we’ve got a variety of tutorials that use MySQL and MongoDB:

• Sentiment Analysis in MySQL
• Question Answering in MySQL
• Text Summarization in MySQL
• Sentiment Analysis in MongoDB
• Text Summarization in MongoDB

What’s Next?

Have fun while trying it out yourself!

• Bookmark MindsDB repository on GitHub.
• Sign up for a free MindsDB account.
• Engage with the MindsDB community on Slack or GitHub to ask questions and share your ideas and thoughts.

If this tutorial was helpful, please give us a GitHub star here.