For question answering, vector/semantic search is clearly a better fit in my mind, and I can see how the contextual models can enable and bolster that. However, because I’ve implemented and used so many keyword based systems, that just doesn’t seem to be how my brain works.

An example I’m thinking of is finding a sushi restaurant near me with availability this weekend around dinner time. I’d love to be able to search for this as I’ve written it. How I would search for it would be search for sushi restaurant, sort by distance and hope the application does a proper job of surfacing time filtering.

Conversely, this is mostly how I would build this system. Perhaps with a layer to determine user intention to pull out restaurant type, location sorting, and time filtering.

I could see using semantic search for filtering down the restaurants to related to sushi, but do we then drop back into traditional search for filtering and sorting? Utilize function calling to have the LLM parameterize our search query?

As stated, perhaps I’m not thinking of these the right way because of my experiences with existing systems, which I find seem to give me better results when well built