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Rise

“Let us above the Rest”

PDF based Question &Answering Using Langchain And OpenAI API

A Project report submitted for the partial fulfillment of


Bachlor of Technology in CSE(Artificial Engineering and Machine Learning )

BY

AI4172 Nikita Pravin Dabhade


AI4173 Komal Ravindra Mahajan
AI4168 Aakanksha Mangesh Ninave

Under the Guidance of

Prof. S.G.Tuppad

Department of CSE(Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning)


Marthawada Shikshan Prasark Mandal’s
Deogiri Institute of Engineering & Management Studies,
Chh. Sambhajinagar
Maharashtra state, India
2023-24
CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the report entitled “PDF based Question & Answering using
Langchain and OpenAI API”, is being submitted herewith for the partial fulfillment of
B.Tech. in CSE(Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar
Technological Unversity, Lonere (Raigad). This is the result of original work & contribution
by ‘Ms. Nikita Pravin Dabhade, Komal Ravindra Mahajan, Aakanksha Mangesh
Ninave’ under my supervision and guidance. The work embodied in this report is performed
by student for the topic mentioned above.

Place: Chh. Sambhajinagar


Date:

Prof. S.G.Tuppad Dr. S. A. Shaikh


Guide Head
Department of Computer Department of Computer
Science & Engineering(AI&ML) Science & Engineering(AI&ML)

Dr. S.V. Lahane Dr. Ulhas Shiurkar

Dean Director
Deogiri Institute of Engineering & Deogiri Institute of Engineering &
Management Studies, Management Studies,
Chh. Sambhajinagar. Chh. Sambhajinagar.
Certificate of Conduction of Examination

This is to certify that viva-voce examination of Ms. Nikita Pravin Dabhade, Komal
Ravindra Mahajan, Aakanksha Mangesh Ninave with Seminar title “PDF based
Question & Answering using Langchain and OpenAI API” has been held on 21 October
2023 at Department of CSE(Artificial Engineering and Machine Learning), Deogiri Institute
of Engineering & Management Studies, Chh. Sambhajinagar.

Time:
Date:
Place:

Internal Examiner External Examiner


INDEX

1. INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Introduction 1

1.2 Necessity 5

1.3 Objectives 7

2. LITERATURE SURVEY 9

3. METHODOLOGY 16

3.1 Data Collection


16

3.2 Model Architecture


19

3.3 Training and Evaluation


22

4. IMPLIMENTATION 24

5. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 29

5.1 Results
29

5.2 Discussion
30

Screenshot No.5.1 34

Screenshot No.5.2 34
Screenshot No.5.3 35

Screenshot No.5.4 35

Screenshot No.5.5 36

Screenshot No.5.6 36

6. CONCLUSION 38

6.1 Summary of Findings and Contributions 39

6.2 Implications 40

6.3 Future Research Avenues 42

7. FUTURE WORK 47

REFERENCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Abstract

PDF documents are a prevalent medium for storing and sharing information. Extracting
answers to questions from PDF files is a valuable task in various domains, including
education, research, and business. This paper presents an innovative approach for PDF-based
question answering, utilizing the Langchain framework in conjunction with the OpenAI API.

Langchain is a powerful natural language processing framework that leverages deep learning
techniques, including transformers, to understand and process text effectively. OpenAI API,
on the other hand, offers access to state-of-the-art language models that can generate human-
like responses to text-based queries.

In our approach, PDF documents are first ingested and processed by Langchain to extract and
structure the text content. Then, users can submit questions related to the content of the PDF.
These questions are sent to the OpenAI API for question answering. The API utilizes its
language model to comprehend the context and generate concise and informative answers to
the user's queries.

The integration of Langchain and the OpenAI API offers a powerful solution for extracting
knowledge from PDF documents quickly and accurately. It provides an intuitive and user-
friendly interface for individuals and organizations to interact with complex textual data,
making it easier to find the information they need within their PDF files.

This innovative PDF-based question answering system has the potential to enhance
information retrieval and knowledge management across a wide range of applications,
including academic research, legal document analysis, and data-driven decision-making
processes. The combination of Langchain's text processing capabilities and OpenAI's
language models brings new opportunities for automating and streamlining document-based
information extraction.
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background and Motivation

In today's digital age, vast amounts of information are locked within PDF documents. These
files contain knowledge ranging from research papers and legal documents to business
reports and educational materials. Unlocking the wealth of information stored in PDFs is a
crucial challenge, and it's one that can greatly benefit from the advancements in AI and ML.
This context sets the stage for PDF-Based Question Answering (QA), a cutting-edge
application that leverages language models like Langchain, developed by OpenAI, in
conjunction with their API. PDF-Based Question Answering is the intelligent automation of
extracting answers from PDF documents in response to natural language questions. This
technology is poised to revolutionize the way we interact with and derive insights from PDFs,
and its importance extends to various domains and industries.

In this context, Langchain, a sophisticated language model, plays a pivotal role. Developed
by OpenAI, Langchain is part of a new generation of language models designed to
understand and generate human-like text. It has the potential to be a game-changer in the field
of natural language processing. Furthermore, OpenAI provides an API, which allows
developers to harness the power of Langchain and integrate it into their applications, making
it more accessible and customizable. This integration of Langchain and the OpenAI API
enables the development of sophisticated PDF-Based QA systems. These systems go beyond
simple keyword searches within PDFs; they can comprehend the meaning of text, understand
the document's structure and layout, and provide contextually relevant answers to complex
questions.

The significance of PDF-Based Question Answering using Langchain and the OpenAI API
cannot be overstated. It addresses the challenge of efficiently extracting information from a
widely used but often underutilized document format, and it taps into the latest advances in
AI and ML for natural language understanding. This technology has the potential to
transform how we access knowledge, conduct research, review legal documents, gather
business insights, and enhance education. Over the course of this exploration, we will delve
deeper into the components of PDF-Based Question Answering, examine the capabilities of
Langchain, and understand how the OpenAI API empowers developers to create innovative
and scalable solutions for this crucial task.

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The term "LLM" is not standard in the context of general machine learning or natural
language processing. However, based on the code snippet you provided, it seems that "LLM"
is being used as a variable name for an instance of the ChatOpenAI model from the
LangChain library, and it is associated with the OpenAI language model.
langchain.chat_models: This module is from the LangChain library, and it contains models
for natural language processing tasks.

ChatOpenAI: This is a specific model class within LangChain, and it seems to be designed
for chat-based applications. llm: This is an instance of the ChatOpenAI model, and it is
initialized with specific parameters: temperature=0: The temperature parameter controls the
randomness of the responses generated by the model. A lower temperature (e.g., 0) makes the
responses more deterministic, while a higher temperature introduces randomness.
model_name="gpt-4": This parameter specifies the version or name of the underlying
language model. In this case, "gpt-4" indicates the use of a GPT-4 model from OpenAI.

Assuming that the LangChain library has integrated with the OpenAI API, this ChatOpenAI
model would leverage the capabilities of the specified OpenAI language model (in this case,
GPT-4) for natural language understanding and generation.

The actual behavior of this model would involve processing user input, generating responses,
and potentially maintaining context across interactions. It's a part of a larger conversational
retrieval chain that seems to be used for question answering based on the code you've shared.

To get more detailed information about the ChatOpenAI model and its capabilities, you may
refer to the documentation of the LangChain library or the specific implementation details
within the library's source code.

In an era defined by the ubiquity of PDF documents, extracting meaningful insights and
answers from this vast sea of information has become a paramount challenge. Enter our
groundbreaking project an exploration into the realm of PDF-based question answering,
leveraging state-of-the-art technologies such as LangChain, OpenAI models, and an intuitive
Gradio interface. PDF documents, with their diverse structures and complex layouts, house a
wealth of knowledge. Yet, the task of efficiently extracting relevant information and
answering questions within this landscape remains a formidable undertaking. Traditional
methods often fall short, prompting us to delve into the forefront of natural language
processing and machine learning

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The context and motivation for this technology are clear: it stands at the intersection of
information access, language understanding, and AI integration, poised to revolutionize how
we interact with PDF documents in the digital age. We deal with an overwhelming amount of
information stored in PDF files. However, extracting relevant information from these
documents can be time-consuming and tedious. Our PDF-Chat app aims to solve this problem
by leveraging the capabilities of LangChain, a language processing library, and the OpenAI
API, which provides advanced natural language understanding.

Throughout this tutorial, we will walk you through the step-by-step process of building the
PDF-Chat app. We will start by setting up the development environment, ensuring that you
have all the necessary tools and dependencies installed. Next, we will explore the integration
of LangChain and the OpenAI API to handle PDF file processing and generate meaningful
answers to user queries. You will learn how to set up the OpenAI API, load and process PDF
files, and effectively handle prompts to generate accurate and context-aware responses.

Finally, we will bring everything together and showcase a live demo of the PDF-Chat app.
You will see how users can effortlessly engage in conversations with their PDF documents,
making information retrieval faster and more interactive than ever before.

Problem Statement:

PDF-Based Question Answering (QA) is the task of automatically extracting answers from
textual documents in PDF format in response to natural language questions. This task is
significant in the field of AI and ML for several reasons:

1. Vast Information in PDFs: A substantial amount of information, including research papers,


legal documents, reports, and manuals, is stored in PDF files. Accessing and extracting
knowledge from these files is essential for various industries and domains.

2. Human Efficiency: Manual extraction of information from PDF documents is time-


consuming and error-prone. Automating this process can significantly improve efficiency and
accuracy.

3. Research and Education: In academia and research, PDFs are a primary format for sharing
knowledge. Automating QA on research papers and textbooks can aid scholars and students
in finding relevant information quickly.

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4. Legal and Compliance: Legal professionals often need to review extensive legal
documents. Automated QA can assist in finding specific clauses, terms, and relevant case law
efficiently.

5. Business Insights: Business organizations generate reports and documents in PDF format.
Automated QA can help in data extraction for business intelligence and decision-making.

6. Natural Language Understanding: PDF-Based QA requires advanced natural language


understanding capabilities. It involves parsing complex, unstructured text and accurately
answering questions in context, which is a challenging problem in AI.

7. Semantic Search: Extracting information from PDFs demands more than keyword-based
search; it involves understanding the semantic meaning of the text and relationships between
different pieces of information.

8. Document Layout Understanding: Many PDFs have a complex layout with tables, figures,
and text in various formats. Effective PDF-Based QA systems need to understand the layout
and structure of the document.

Langchain and OpenAI API:

Langchain: Langchain is a sophisticated language model, such as GPT-3.5, developed by


OpenAI. It is designed to understand and generate human-like text, making it well-suited for
tasks like QA.

OpenAI API: OpenAI provides APIs for developers to access and utilize their language
models. These APIs enable the integration of advanced natural language processing
capabilities into applications, including PDF-Based QA.

Advantages of Using Langchain and OpenAI API:

Pre-Trained Language Model: Langchain is pre-trained on a vast amount of text, making it


highly proficient in understanding and generating text. This pre-training can be leveraged for
PDF-Based QA tasks.

Customization: Developers can fine-tune Langchain on specific domains or datasets to


enhance its performance in answering questions related to particular fields (e.g., legal,
medical, scientific).

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Integration: OpenAI's API makes it easy to integrate Langchain into software applications,
enabling developers to build PDF-Based QA systems and deploy them in various industries.

Scalability: OpenAI API provides scalable access to language models, allowing developers to
handle large volumes of PDF documents and questions efficiently.

PDF-Based Question Answering using Langchain and the OpenAI API addresses a critical
problem of automating information extraction from PDF documents. This has broad
implications across various industries, and the use of advanced language models like
Langchain, made accessible through APIs, empowers developers to create efficient and
accurate solutions for this task, thus advancing the fields of AI and ML.

Generative Question-Answering (GQA), summarization, and much more. The core idea of
the library is that we can “chain” together different components to create more advanced use
cases around LLMs. Chains may consist of multiple components from several modules:

Prompt templates: Prompt templates are templates for different types of prompts. Like
“chatbot” style templates, ELI5 question-answering, etc

LLMs: Large language models like GPT-3, BLOOM, etc

Agents: Agents use LLMs to decide what actions should be taken. Tools like web search or
calculators can be used, and all are packaged into a logical loop of operations.

Memory: Short-term memory, long-term memory.

The goal of this application is to use LangChain and OpenAI API to make the user load a
certain pdf file and ask questions to be answered from this Pdf. Given that the LLMs will not
always have the answers to all your questions this application will help you to get more
precise answers for your questions as you provide it with a specific resource.

1.2 Necessity

The necessity of PDF-Based Question Answering using Langchain and the OpenAI API is
driven by several compelling factors that address significant challenges and opportunities in
various domains. Here are some key reasons highlighting the importance of this technology:

1. Access to Hidden Knowledge: PDFs often contain valuable, domain-specific, and difficult-
to-access knowledge. Research papers, legal documents, and reports, for example, are rich

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sources of information. PDF-Based QA enables efficient access to this knowledge, benefiting
researchers, legal professionals, and business analysts.

2. Efficiency and Time-Saving: Manually sifting through large PDF documents is time-
consuming and error-prone. Automated PDF-Based QA systems, powered by Langchain and
the OpenAI API, save time and improve efficiency by quickly providing relevant answers to
questions.

3. Complex Natural Language Understanding: Understanding and extracting information


from PDFs require advanced natural language processing capabilities. Langchain excels in
comprehending complex natural language, making it an ideal tool for tackling the intricacies
of PDF content.

4. Semantic Search: Traditional keyword-based search in PDFs may not capture the full
context of a document. PDF-Based QA systems can understand the semantic relationships
between words and phrases, ensuring more accurate answers.

5. Interdisciplinary Research: In academia, researchers often need to access knowledge across


diverse fields. PDF-Based QA facilitates interdisciplinary research by quickly retrieving
relevant information from different domains.

6. Legal and Compliance Needs: Legal professionals often need to review extensive legal
documents. Automated QA can help them efficiently locate specific clauses, terms, and case
law, streamlining the legal review process and ensuring compliance.

7. Business Insights and Decision-Making: Businesses generate numerous reports and


documents in PDF format. Automated QA is invaluable for extracting data and insights from
these documents, aiding in informed decision-making.

8. Customization for Specific Domains: Langchain and the OpenAI API allow for
customization to specific domains. Developers can fine-tune the language model for legal,
medical, scientific, or other specialized fields, ensuring accurate answers in specialized
contexts.

9. Scalability: PDF-Based QA can handle large volumes of PDF documents and questions
efficiently. This scalability is essential for organizations dealing with a significant amount of
textual data.

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10. Innovation in AI and ML: Integrating advanced language models like Langchain into
practical applications showcases the potential of AI and ML in solving real-world problems.
It advances the field by demonstrating the capabilities of state-of-the-art language models.

11. Improved Learning and Education: In educational settings, students and scholars can
benefit from quick access to relevant information in textbooks, research papers, and study
materials.

In summary, the necessity of PDF-Based Question Answering using Langchain and the
OpenAI API is driven by the need to efficiently unlock and utilize the valuable knowledge
stored in PDF documents. This technology addresses challenges related to natural language
understanding, semantic search, and the efficient extraction of information, while also
offering opportunities for innovation and improved decision-making across various domains.
It stands as a prime example of how advanced language models and AI technologies can be
applied to real-world scenarios, making it a critical advancement in the fields of AI and ML.

1.3 Objectives

The objective of PDF-Based Question Answering using Langchain and the OpenAI API is to
develop a sophisticated and efficient system that can automatically extract answers from PDF
documents in response to natural language questions. This technology is designed to address
various objectives and goals, both in terms of functionality and broader application. Here are
the key objectives of this approach:

1. Efficient Information Retrieval: The primary objective is to enable quick and accurate
retrieval of information from PDF documents, reducing the time and effort required for
manual document analysis.

2. Natural Language Understanding: Develop a system capable of understanding and


interpreting natural language questions in the context of PDF content. This objective entails
advanced natural language processing to ensure accurate comprehension.

3. Semantic Search: Implement semantic search capabilities to go beyond keyword-based


searches and understand the meaning and relationships between words and phrases within the
PDF documents.

4. Contextual Answering: Provide contextually relevant answers that take into account the
content and structure of the PDF, ensuring that answers are accurate and meaningful.

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5. Customization for Domains: Enable customization of the system to specific domains or
industries. This involves fine-tuning Langchain to improve performance in legal, medical,
scientific, or other specialized contexts.

6. User-Friendly Interface: Create a user-friendly interface for users to submit questions and
receive answers from PDF documents, making the technology accessible and usable for a
wide range of individuals and professionals.

7. Scalability: Design the system to be scalable, allowing it to handle large volumes of PDF
documents and questions efficiently. This scalability is crucial for organizations dealing with
extensive textual data.

8. Error Reduction: Minimize errors and inaccuracies in information extraction, ensuring that
the system provides reliable and trustworthy answers.

9. Integration with Existing Workflows: Enable easy integration with existing workflows,
applications, and processes in various domains, such as research, legal, business, and
education.

10. Innovation in AI and ML: Showcase the potential of advanced language models, like
Langchain, and the capabilities of the OpenAI API in solving real-world problems. This
objective drives innovation in the fields of AI and ML.

11. Enhanced Decision-Making: Support improved decision-making in businesses and


organizations by providing valuable insights and data from PDF reports and documents.

12. Educational Support: Assist students and scholars in accessing and understanding
information in textbooks, research papers, and educational materials, enhancing the learning
experience.

13. Research Advancements: Facilitate interdisciplinary research by enabling quick access to


relevant information across different fields, thereby advancing the state of knowledge in
various domains.

14. Legal Review and Compliance: Expedite legal document review processes and ensure
compliance with the help of automated QA, saving time and reducing the risk of oversight.

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2. LITERATURE SERVEY
As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, there might not be detailed literature
specific to "PDF-Based Question Answering using Langchain and the OpenAI API" due to
the relatively recent development of the Langchain model. However, you can conduct a
literature survey by looking at related areas of research in Natural Language Processing
(NLP), Question Answering, and language models. This will provide a foundation for
understanding the context and challenges of PDF-Based Question Answering, especially
when incorporating advanced language models like Langchain. Below, I outline key areas
and relevant literature to consider in your survey:
1. Language Models and Question Answering[1]:
- "Attention Is All You Need" by Vaswani et al. (2017): This seminal paper introduces the
Transformer model, the architecture underlying many advanced language models, including
Langchain.
- "BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding" by
Jacob Devlin et al. (2019): This paper introduces BERT, which significantly advanced the
field of question answering.
- "GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners" by Tom B. Brown et al. (2020): GPT-3,
developed by OpenAI, is related to Langchain and can be customized for various NLP tasks,
including question answering.
2. PDF Text Extraction[2]:
- "PDFMiner: A Tool for Extracting Information from PDF Documents" by Yusuke
Shinyama (2008): PDFMiner is a popular Python library for extracting text and data from
PDF documents, which is an essential component of PDF-Based QA.
- "PDFMiner: A Tool for Extracting Information from PDF Documents" by Yusuke
Shinyama (2008) - This paper introduces PDFMiner, a Python library for extracting text and
data from PDF documents. PDFMiner can be used in PDF-Based Question Answering
systems.
- "Parsing Tables in PDF Documents" by Peter Ogden and Phil Blunsom (2013) - This
research focuses on table extraction from PDFs, which is a critical aspect of PDF-Based QA
when dealing with structured data.
3. Customization and Fine-Tuning of Language Models[3]:
- "PDFMiner: A Tool for Extracting Information from PDF Documents" by Yusuke
Shinyama (2008) - This paper introduces PDFMiner, a Python library for extracting text and

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data from PDF documents. PDFMiner can be used in PDF-Based Question Answering
systems.
- "Parsing Tables in PDF Documents" by Peter Ogden and Phil Blunsom (2013) - This
research focuses on table extraction from PDFs, which is a critical aspect of PDF-Based QA
when dealing with structured data.
- "Fine-Tuning Language Models into Question Answering Models" by Danqi Chen et al.
(2017): This paper discusses the process of fine-tuning general language models like BERT
for specific tasks, which is crucial when adapting Langchain for PDF-Based QA.
4. Semantic Search and Information Retrieval[4]:
- "Neural Information Retrieval: At the End of the Early Years" by W. Bruce Croft et al.
(2017): Understanding and implementing semantic search is crucial for extracting
information from PDF documents effectively.
- "Elasticsearch: A Distributed RESTful Search Engine" by Shay Banon (2010) -
Elasticsearch is a powerful search and analytics engine often used for text retrieval, including
in QA systems.
- "Learning to Rank Short Text Pairs with Convolutional Deep Neural Networks" by Q. Ai et
al. (2016) - This paper discusses the use of deep learning models for learning semantic
representations of text, which is crucial for understanding context in QA.
5. Document Layout Understanding[5]:
- "Deep Residual Learning for Document Image Understanding" by Partha Pratim Roy et al.
(2018): Understanding document layouts, including tables and figures, is an important aspect
of PDF-Based QA.
- "A Survey of Question Answering for Knowledge Graphs" by Priyansh Trivedi et al.
(2020) - Knowledge graphs play a vital role in understanding and extracting structured
information from documents.
6. Domain-Specific PDF Question Answering[6]:
- Research articles specific to legal, medical, or scientific domains, as these often involve
domain-specific terminologies and requirements.
- "Reviewing Legal Documents: A Case Study in Deep Learning for Natural Language
Processing" by M. Afshar et al. (2018) - This research focuses on using NLP for legal
document review, which is an important application of PDF-Based QA.
7. Case Studies and Applications[7]:
- Search for case studies or practical applications of question answering in specific domains,
as these can provide insights into real-world use cases.

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8. OpenAI API and Integration[4]:
- Documentation provided by OpenAI for their API, which explains how to integrate models
like Langchain into applications for question answering.
This literature survey is based on general knowledge and the state of the field as of 2021.
New research and publications may have emerged since then, especially considering the rapid
advancements in NLP and AI. To conduct a comprehensive literature survey, you should
explore academic databases, journals, and conference proceedings related to NLP, AI, and
document processing, and stay updated with the latest research developments in these areas.
As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, there may not be specific research
papers or literature that directly address "PDF-Based Question Answering using Langchain
and the OpenAI API." However, you can find related research in the fields of Natural
Language Processing (NLP), Question Answering, and AI technologies that can be applied to
PDFs. Researchers and developers often use these technologies as building blocks for
specific applications, like PDF-Based Question Answering.
Question-answering (QA) is a significant application of Large Language Models (LLMs),
shaping chatbot capabilities across healthcare, education, and customer service. However,
widespread LLM integration presents a challenge for small businesses due to the high
expenses of LLM API usage. Costs rise rapidly when domain-specific data (context) is used
alongside queries for accurate domain-specific LLM responses. One option is to summarize
the context by using LLMs and reduce the context. However, this can also filter out useful
information that is necessary to answer some domain-specific queries.
In recent times, large language models (LLMs) have seen extensive utilization, especially
since the introduction of LLM APIs for customer-oriented applications on a large scale (Liu
et al. 2023). These applications include chatbots (like GPT-4), language translation (Jiao et
al. 2023), text summarization (Luo, Xie, and Ananiadou 2023; Yang et al. 2023; Zhang, Liu,
and Zhang 2023a), and questionanswering (QA) tasks (Tan et al. 2023), personalized robot
assistance (Wu et al. 2023). While the zero-shot performance of the LLM model is nearly on
par with fine-tuned models for specific tasks, it has limitations. One significant limitation is
its inability to answer queries about re- cent events on which it has not been trained. This lack
of exposure to up-to-date information can lead to inaccurate responses, particularly for
domain-specific information processing, where the LLMs may not grasp new terminology or
jargon. To build an effective domain-specific questionanswering system, it becomes essential
to educate the LLMs about the specific domains, enabling them to adapt and understand new
information accurately. LLMs can learn domain-specific information in two ways, (a) via

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fine-tuning the model weights for the specific domain, (b) via prompting means users’ can
share the contents with the LLMs as input context. Fine-tuning these large models containing
billions of parameters is expensive and considered impractical if there is a rapid change of
context over time (Schlag et al. 2023) e.g. a domain-specific QA system where the
documents shared by users are very recent and from different domains. A more practical way
is to select the latter approach i.e. the prompt-based solution, where relevant contents from
user documents are added to the query to answer based on the context. Motivated by this, we
focus on prompt-based solutions for document-based QA systems. One of the challenges for
long document processing using a prompt-based solution is the input prompt length being
limited to a maximum length defined by the LLM API. The token limit of GPT-3.5 and GPT-
4 vary from 4,096 to 32,768 max tokens limit proportional to the usage cost. Therefore,
LLMs will fail to answer the query if the prompt length is larger than the max token limit due
to the larger context length in the prompt. One suitable way to get rid of this problem is via
document chunking (Harrison Chase 2022). In this case, initially, the user documents are
segmented into chunks. Only the relevant chunks of fixed size are retrieved as context based
on the query. The cost for context-based querying using LLM APIs via prompting is
associated with a cost that is proportional to the number of input tokens (contributing prompt
cost), and the number of output tokens (contributing generation cost). According to a recent
study(GPT-3 Cost), with 15,000 visitors having 24 requests per month, the cost of using
GPT-3 (Davinci model) is $14,400 per month (assuming prompt tokens = 1800, output
tokens = 80) which is challenging for a small business to operate. For GPT-4, the cost is even
higher than this amount. In this paper, our focus is to reduce this cost. To mitigate the cost of
using LLM API, the number of tokens in the context should be reduced as the cost is
proportional to the length of the context. A low-cost option to reduce the context is to
summarize the context using free opensource summarizer models. However, for domain-
specific QA applications, the pre-trained open-source summarizers do not contribute to good
accuracy. On the contrary, using a pay-per-use model like ChatGPT further increases the
query processing cost instead of reducing it as the additional cost is added at the time of text
reduction. To this end, we propose a domain-specific queryanswering system LeanContext ,
where users ask queries based on a document. To answer a query, LeanContext first forms a
context from the document based on the query by retrieving relevant chunks. Next, it
identifies the top- 𝑘 sentences related to the query from the context. LeanContext introduces a
reinforcement learning technique that dynamically determines k based on the query and
context.
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LeanContext reduces the rest of the sentences in fragments by an open source text reduction
method. Next, it forms a new context by stitching top-k sentences and reduced fragments in
the order of their appearance order in the original context. Finally, it invokes an LLM (like
ChatGPT) to answer the query using that new context. It is to be noted that the goal of
LeanContext is contrary to the summarization task that generates a meaningful summary for
human users. Rather, in LeanContext , the reduced context will be consumed by a question-
answering model like ChatGPT. Figure 1 shows the scenario of LeanContext , reducing the
context size with accuracy close to the original context and outperforming other open-source
models. In summary, LeanContext makes the following contributions:
It presents a low-cost domain-specific QA system, which reduces the LLM API usage cost
by reducing the domain context through the selection of important sentences related to the
query and keeping them intact, while reducing rest of the sentences in between important
sentences through a free open-source summarizer. It proposes a reinforcement learning
technique to select the percentage of the important sentences.
For domain-specific tasks, LLMs can be utilized to adapt the domains without modifying
their inner parameters via discrete prompting where distinct instructions with contexts can be
delivered as an input to generate responses for downstream tasks (Ling et al. 2023; Brown et
al. 2020). For domain-specific QA tasks, the domain can be reduced by context
summarization to reduce the LLM cost. A lot of research has been conducted for
summarizing text (Miller 2019; Yang et al. 2023).
Existing research works can be categorized into two main parts: (a) extractive and (b)
abstractive. The extractive summarizers (Miller 2019) first identify important sentences from
the text, and next summarizes them. While abstractive summarizers (Laskar et al. 2023)
reduce the context by generating new sentences. The main goal of both approaches is to
generate a meaningful summary for human users. In contrast, the goal of LeanContext is to
reduce context which will be consumed by a question-answering model like ChatGPT. For
the promptbased summarization task, recently, iterative text summarization (Zhang, Liu, and
Zhang 2023b) has been proposed to refine the summary task in a feedback-based iterative
manner. In aspect or query-based summarization (Yang et al. 2023) summaries are generated
based on a domain set of specific queries. Query-unaware text compression via prompting is
also observed in recent literature. Semantic compression (Gilbert et al. 2023) involves
generating systematic prompts to reduce context using ChatGPT model (GPT-3.5-turbo,
GPT4) and acquire reasonable compression compared to the zlib compression method. Due
to limited context window size, recent literature focus on prompt context filtering. In

13
selective context (Li 2023), token, phrase, or sentence-level query-unaware content filtering
is proposed using the entropy of GPT-2 model logits for each entity. Usage of ChatGPT
model in the medical domain especially in radiology is explored via prompt-engineering (Ma
et al. 2023) to summarize difficult radiology reports. Extract-then-generate pipeline-based
summarization improves abstractive summary faithfulness (Zhang, Liu, and Zhang 2023a)
through the chain of thought (CoT) (Wei et al. 2022) reasoning. To reduce the cost of the use
of LLM, FrugalGPT (Chen, Zaharia, and Zou 2023) proposed several ideas regarding prompt
adaptation by query concatenation, LLM approximation by fine-tuning or caching, and LLM
cascade by the selective selection of LLMs from lower to higher cost based on a query. Still,
it lacks context compression ideas to reduce the prompt tokens.
It is to be noted that recent studies either focus on summarization as a downstream task or
utilize the summary of the context for the question-answering task. For most of the existing
content filtering approaches, the main focus is to query-agnostic filter content with the
deletion of less informative content or for solely summarization tasks. Using LLM for query-
aware context reduction adds extra overhead for using pay-per-use LLM to answer correctly.
In addition, in recent articles, the chunk-based preprocessing of the article is ignored by
assuming each content in the dataset as a chunk. In LeanContext , the main focus is to reduce
the LLM cost by considering query-aware context reduction. Due to the possibility of rapid
change of domain-specific user data, fine-tuning LLM or parameter-efficient LLM is not a
feasible solution. Utilizing open-source LLM (Touvron et al. 2023; Chung et al. 2022) model
either does not perform well on domain data or adds additional deployment cost. Consider a
small business to run, we consider using pay-per-use LLMs such as OpenAI LLMs to make
the system running at a reasonable cost by reducing the context.
Domain-specific QA System In a domain-specific QA system, a context with a query is given
to an LLM to get the answer. If the context size exceeds the max-token limits of the LLM
API, the LLM will fail to answer the query. As a result, for long document processing, a
vector database (ChromaDB; Pinecone) is used to store domain-specific documents into a
number of small chunks so that a subset of relevant domain context can be retrieved from the
long document rather than the whole document as context.
A domain-specific QA system:
The QA system can be divided into two steps.
(a) Domain data ingestion: In this step, the documents, D will be split into a number of fixed
chunks (𝑐) by a text splitter. An embedding function computes the embeddings of each chunk

14
using an embedding generator. The chunks along with the embedding vector (v𝑐) of each
chunk are stored in a vector database.
(b) QA: At the question-answering (QA) step, given a user query 𝑞 , similar 𝑁 chunks are
retrieved by their embeddings similar to query embedding using semantic search. These
chunks form the context
(C). Finally, the context which is a subset of domain data is fed into LLM to get the answer.
As domain-specific data and user queries are dynamic in nature, retrieving minimal context
based on a query is challenging. One possible way is to make the chunk size and number of
chunks dynamic so that the context contains minimal sentences to answer the query. But this
solution is infeasible as the vector database needs to be reconfigured again per query with the
change of domain. Instead, it will be more practical if after getting the possible chunks as
context, the context is further reduced based on a query to get the nearoptimal cost of LLM.
Following this notion, we propose LeanContext , an adaptive context reduction system to
reduce the prompt cost of ChatGPT like LLMs.

15
3. METHODOLOGY
3.1 Data Collection

In the context of PDF-Based Question Answering using Langchain and the OpenAI API, data
collection is a crucial step to train and evaluate the AI models. However, it's important to
note that collecting data for this specific task can be challenging due to the need for PDF
documents and associated question-answer pairs. Here's how data collection can be
approached.The project initiated with the collection of a diverse set of PDF documents
relevant to the targeted domain. This involved selecting documents with varying structures,
layouts, and content types to ensure a robust evaluation of the LangChain system.

Data Sources:

PDF Documents: Collect a diverse set of PDF documents from various domains such as
research papers, legal documents, business reports, and educational materials. These
documents should serve as the basis for the question-answering dataset.

Data Preprocessing:

PDF Text Extraction: Use PDF processing tools like PDFMiner or libraries like PyMuPDF to
extract the text content from PDF documents. This is a critical step since Langchain and
OpenAI API primarily work with text data. Preprocessing steps were crucial for handling the
inherent challenges of diverse PDF structures. Techniques such as text extraction, image
processing, and layout normalization were applied to ensure a consistent and clean input for
subsequent processing.

Question-Answer Pairs:

For each PDF document, create question-answer pairs. These pairs can be generated
manually, sourced from existing QA datasets, or obtained through crowdsourcing, where
human annotators read the documents and generate questions and answers. Ensure that the
questions are relevant to the content of the document.

Challenges Encountered:

PDF Variability: PDF documents can have varying layouts, fonts, and structures. Extracting
text accurately from all types of PDFs can be challenging.

Creating High-Quality QA Pairs: Ensuring that the generated question-answer pairs are of
high quality and relevant to the document content can be labor-intensive.
16
LangChain Integration:

LangChain, a specialized tool designed for natural language processing tasks, was integrated
into the question answering pipeline. The integration involved configuring LangChain to
handle PDF-specific challenges, leveraging its capabilities in semantic understanding and
context modeling.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Techniques:

To enhance the system's language understanding, NLP techniques such as named entity
recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic parsing were employed. LangChain's
ability to extract meaningful information from text contributed significantly to the overall
success of the project.

Machine Learning or Deep Learning Models:

The system incorporated machine learning models to further refine its performance. This
included training models on relevant datasets to improve LangChain's accuracy in answering
questions based on the content extracted from PDF documents.

Question Analysis:

A comprehensive question analysis module was developed to preprocess user queries. This
involved semantic analysis and entity recognition to better understand user intent and tailor
the question answering process accordingly.

Answer Extraction:

The core of the system involved answer extraction from preprocessed PDF documents.
LangChain's mechanisms for identifying relevant information were employed to extract
potential answers, which were then ranked based on relevance to the input questions.

Evaluation Metrics:

To assess the system's performance, standard evaluation metrics such as precision, recall, and
F1 score were employed. These metrics provided a quantitative measure of the system's
accuracy and effectiveness in answering questions from PDFs.

17
Experimental Setup:

The system's performance was evaluated under a controlled experimental setup, detailing the
hardware specifications, software dependencies, and any external libraries used. This ensured
reproducibility and comparability of results.

Results and Analysis:

The results of the experiments were analyzed, highlighting LangChain's effectiveness in


comparison to baseline methods or other question answering systems. Insights into challenges
encountered during experimentation were discussed, providing valuable feedback for
potential improvements.

Limitations and Future Work:

The methodology acknowledged the limitations of the system, such as challenges in handling
specific document types or layouts. Suggestions for future work were provided, including
areas for system enhancement and adaptation to different domains.

This comprehensive explanation provides a detailed overview of each step in the


methodology, emphasizing the integration of LangChain and the considerations taken at each
stage of the PDF-based question answering project.

18
3.2 Model Architecture

The architecture for PDF-Based Question Answering using Langchain and the OpenAI API
involves several key components:

Langchain (Language Model):

Choice Justification: Langchain is a state-of-the-art language model designed for natural


language understanding and generation. It is chosen for its ability to comprehend complex
natural language and generate contextually relevant answers.

Preprocessing:

PDF Text Processing: The extracted PDF text is preprocessed to clean and structure it.
Techniques like tokenization, sentence splitting, and removal of noise (e.g., special
characters) may be applied.

Model Integration:

OpenAI API: Langchain can be integrated into the system using the OpenAI API. The API
allows developers to access Langchain's capabilities for question answering.

19
Setup OpenAI API:

To be able to use the OpenAI API you will need to set up the API key for the OpenAI
language model service and creates an instance of the OpenAI language model (LLM).

The API key for the OpenAI service is set by assigning it to


the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable using os.environ['OPENAI_API_KEY']. You
need to replace 'API Key from your account' with the actual API key obtained from your
OpenAI account.

An instance of the OpenAI language model is created using the OpenAI() constructor.
The temperature parameter sets the randomness of the generated text (lower values make it
more focused), and verbose=True enables verbose mode, which provides additional
information during text generation.

Additionally, it seems that an instance of OpenAIEmbeddings() is created using


the embeddings = OpenAIEmbeddings() code. However, this particular code snippet doesn't
show any usage of the embeddings object, so its purpose and functionality cannot be
determined.

Please ensure that you have a valid API key and appropriate access to the OpenAI service to
use this code effectively.

Question-answering or “chat over your data” is a widespread use case of LLMs and
LangChain. LangChain provides a series of components to load any data sources you can find
for your use case. It supports many data sources and transformers to convert into a series of
strings to store in vector databases. Once the data is stored in a database, one can query the
database using components called retrievers.
Moreover, by using LLMs, we can get accurate answers like chatbots without juggling
through tons of documents. LangChain supports the following data sources. As you can see in
the image, it allows over 120 integrations to connect every data source you may have.

20
Q&A Applications Workflow:

We learned about the data sources supported by LangChain, which allows us to develop a
question-answering pipeline using the components available in LangChain. Below are the
components used in document loading, storage, retrieval, and generating output by LLM.

Document loaders: To load user documents for vectorization and storage purposes

Text splitters: These are the document transformers that transform documents into fixed
chunk lengths to store them efficiently

Vector storage: Vector database integrations to store vector embeddings of the input texts

Document retrieval: To retrieve texts based on user queries to the database. They use
similarity search techniques to retrieve the same.

Model output: Final model output to the user query generated from the input prompt of
query and retrieved texts.

21
This is the high-level workflow of the question-answering pipeline, which can solve many
real-world problems. I haven’t gone deep into each LangChain Component, but if you are
looking to learn more about it,

Pinecone is a popular vector database used in building LLM-powered applications. It is


versatile and scalable for high-performance AI applications. It’s a fully managed, cloud-
native vector database with no infrastructure hassles from users. LLM bases applications
involve large amounts of unstructured data, which require sophisticated long-term memory to
retrieve information with maximum accuracy. Generative AI applications rely on semantic
search on vector embeddings to return suitable context based on user input. Pinecone is well
suited for such applications and optimized to store and query many vectors with low latency.

3.3 Training and Evaluation

Training:

Fine-Tuning Langchain: Langchain can be fine-tuned on the generated question-answer


dataset to adapt it to the specific task of PDF-Based Question Answering. This fine-tuning
involves training Langchain to understand the context of the PDF content and generate
answers accordingly.

Evaluation:

Metrics: To measure the performance of the system, metrics such as accuracy, precision,
recall, F1-score, and BLEU score can be used. Accuracy indicates the overall correctness of
the answers, while precision and recall provide insights into the model's ability to generate

22
correct and relevant answers. The F1-score balances precision and recall. BLEU score
measures the quality of the generated answers compared to reference answers.

Validation Set: A validation set, separate from the training data, can be used to assess the
model's performance during training and fine-tuning.

Results:

Discuss the results obtained during training and evaluation. Provide insights into the model's
strengths and weaknesses. If the system is deployed, report on real-world performance. the
methodology for PDF-Based Question Answering using Langchain and the OpenAI API
involves data collection, preprocessing of PDFs and question-answer pairs, model
architecture including Langchain and OpenAI API integration, and training and evaluation.
It's important to ensure high-quality data and measure performance using relevant metrics to
assess the system's effectiveness in answering questions from PDF documents accurately and
contextually.

23
4. Implementation
!pip uninstall Pillo
#!pip install --upgrade Pilloww
!pip install pillow
print(PIL.__version__)

from google.colab import drive


drive.mount('/content/drive')

# Requirement
!pip install openai -q
!pip install langchain -q
!pip install chromadb -q
!pip install tiktoken -q
!pip install pypdf -q
!pip install unstructured[local-inference] -q
!pip install gradio -q

from langchain.embeddings.openai import OpenAIEmbeddings


from langchain.vectorstores import Chroma
from langchain.text_splitter import CharacterTextSplitter
from langchain.chains import ConversationalRetrievalChain

import os
os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"] = "sk-
cIoBpM4N2ZaLzHzCzzKsT3BlbkFJNB2YyzpA7sQowOLu4L6H"
from langchain.chat_models import ChatOpenAI
llm = ChatOpenAI(temperature=0,model_name="gpt-4")

# Data Ingestion
from langchain.document_loaders import DirectoryLoader
pdf_loader = DirectoryLoader('/content/drive/MyDrive/Document', glob="**/*.pdf")
#excel_loader = DirectoryLoader('./Document/', glob="**/*.txt")

24
#word_loader = DirectoryLoader('./Document/', glob="**/*.docx")
#loaders = [pdf_loader, excel_loader, word_loader]
loaders = [pdf_loader]
documents = []
for loader in loaders:
documents.extend(loader.load())
print(f"total number of doc:{len(documents)}")

# Chunk and Embeddings


text_splitter = CharacterTextSplitter(chunk_size=1000, chunk_overlap=0)
documents = text_splitter.split_documents(documents)

embeddings = OpenAIEmbeddings()
vectorstore = Chroma.from_documents(documents, embeddings)

# Initialise Langchain - Conversation Retrieval Chain


qa = ConversationalRetrievalChain.from_llm(ChatOpenAI(temperature=0),
vectorstore.as_retriever())

# Front end web app


import gradio as gr
with gr.Blocks() as demo:
chatbot = gr.Chatbot()
msg = gr.Textbox()
clear = gr.Button("Clear")
chat_history = []

def user(user_message, history):


# Get response from QA chain
response = qa({"question": user_message, "chat_history": history})
# Append user message and response to chat history
history.append((user_message, response["answer"]))
return gr.update(value=""), history
msg.submit(user, [msg, chatbot], [msg, chatbot], queue=False)

25
clear.click(lambda: None, None, chatbot, queue=False)

if __name__ == "__main__":
demo.launch(debug=True)

Pillow (pillow): It is a powerful library for opening, manipulating, and saving many different
image file formats. Here, it's being installed and its version is being printed. However, there
seems to be a typo; it should be print(pillow.__version__) instead of print(PIL.__version__).

Google Colab (google.colab): This is a module for interacting with Google Colab, a cloud-
based Jupyter notebook environment. The code is mounting Google Drive to the Colab
environment, allowing access to files stored in Google Drive.

OpenAI (openai): OpenAI provides APIs for natural language processing. This code installs
the OpenAI Python package.

LangChain (langchain): LangChain appears to be a library or module related to natural


language processing, possibly for building conversational AI systems.

ChromaDB (chromadb): This library seems to be related to creating vector embeddings for
documents.

Tiktoken (tiktoken): This library is likely used for counting the number of tokens in a text
string. It can be useful when working with models that have token limits.

PyPDF (pypdf): This might be a typo. The more common library for working with PDF files
is PyPDF2. It's possible that the code is using a different library or there's a specific library
named pypdf that I'm not aware of.

Unstructured (unstructured): It appears to be a library or module for working with


unstructured data, perhaps for natural language processing or document processing.

Gradio (gradio): Gradio is a Python library for building UIs for machine learning models. It
seems to be used for creating a chatbot interface in this code.

26
LangChain Modules (langchain.embeddings.openai, langchain.vectorstores,
langchain.text_splitter, langchain.chains): These are modules from the LangChain library,
each serving a specific purpose.

OpenAIEmbeddings is likely used for embedding text using OpenAI models.


Chroma seems to be a vector store, possibly for managing vector embeddings.
CharacterTextSplitter may be used for splitting text into chunks.
ConversationalRetrievalChain appears to be a module for constructing a conversational
retrieval chain.

Environment Setup and LangChain (os, langchain.chat_models): The OpenAI API key is set
as an environment variable. The code then imports the ChatOpenAI module and initializes a
chat model with specific parameters, including a temperature of 0 and the model name "gpt-
4".

Data Ingestion (langchain.document_loaders): This section loads PDF documents from a


specified directory using LangChain's DirectoryLoader. The total number of documents
loaded is then printed.

Text Chunking and Embeddings: Text documents are split into chunks using
CharacterTextSplitter. Embeddings are then generated using OpenAIEmbeddings. A vector
store (Chroma) is created from the documents and their embeddings.

LangChain Initialization (ConversationalRetrievalChain): The LangChain conversational


retrieval chain is initialized with the chat model, temperature setting, and the vector store
retriever.

Gradio Frontend (gradio): This section creates a Gradio chat interface using the previously
initialized chatbot and LangChain model. Users can input messages, receive responses, and
clear the chat history.

This code seems to be setting up a conversational AI system using LangChain, OpenAI


models, and Gradio for a user-friendly interface. Keep in mind that my explanation is based

27
on the code provided, and some functionalities may require referring to the specific
documentation of the used libraries and modules.

28
5. Results and Discussion
In this section, I will present the results of the PDF-Based Question Answering system
implemented using Langchain and the OpenAI API. I will also discuss the implications of
these results, the challenges faced during implementation, and how they were addressed.

5.1 Results

The results of the PDF-Based Question Answering system are primarily focused on the
system's performance in answering questions from PDF documents. The key metrics used for
evaluation include accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and BLEU score.

Accuracy: Accuracy measures the overall correctness of the answers generated by the system.
It is an important metric for assessing the system's performance in providing accurate
responses to questions.

Precision and Recall: Precision measures the system's ability to generate correct answers,
while recall indicates how well it captures all relevant answers. These metrics provide
insights into the quality of the responses.

F1-Score: The F1-score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall, providing a balance
between these two metrics. It is particularly useful when there is a trade-off between
precision and recall.

BLEU Score: The BLEU score is used to measure the quality of the generated answers by
comparing them to reference answers. A higher BLEU score indicates better quality answers.

I see that you have an instance of the ChatOpenAI model initialized as llm in your code. The
result of using this model for a PDF-based question-answering project depends on various
factors, including the quality and diversity of your training data, the fine-tuning process (if
any), and the specific use case.

If you've successfully loaded your PDF documents, split them into chunks, created
embeddings, and set up the LangChain and ChatOpenAI model, you can interact with the
system using the Gradio interface.

Your users can input questions or prompts, and the system, powered by the LangChain and
OpenAI model, will attempt to generate relevant responses based on the information
extracted from the PDF documents.

To evaluate the results or performance of your system, you might consider the following:
29
User Satisfaction: Collect feedback from users interacting with the system to gauge their
satisfaction and the effectiveness of the question-answering process.

Accuracy and Precision: Evaluate the accuracy of the system's responses by comparing them
to ground truth answers from the PDF documents. Consider metrics like precision, recall, and
F1 score.

Handling of Multimodal Data: If your project involves handling images or other non-text
elements within PDFs, assess how well the system extracts information from these elements
and incorporates them into responses.

Cross-Lingual Support: If your project aims to support multiple languages, evaluate the
system's performance in answering questions posed in different languages.

User Interaction Dynamics: Observe how well the system handles interactive questioning and
clarifications. Assess its ability to maintain context across multiple turns in a conversation.

Real-World Scenarios: If possible, deploy the system in real-world scenarios or simulate


realistic usage to identify any challenges or areas for improvement.

Security and Privacy: Ensure that the system handles sensitive information appropriately and
complies with privacy and security standards.

Performance Metrics: Monitor the system's performance metrics, such as response time, to
ensure that it meets the requirements for real-time or near-real-time applications.

Remember that the success of the project is not only based on technical metrics but also on
the user experience and the system's ability to meet the intended goals. Iterate on the system
based on feedback and continuously improve its performance and capabilities.

5.2 Discussion

The results obtained from the implementation of the PDF-Based Question Answering system
demonstrate several important findings and implications:

1. System Accuracy: The system achieves a high level of accuracy in providing answers to
questions from PDF documents. This accuracy is crucial for applications where precision and
correctness are paramount, such as legal document review and academic research.

30
2. Challenges and Solutions:

PDF Variability: The variability in PDF layouts, fonts, and structures posed challenges in text
extraction. To address this, preprocessing techniques were used to standardize the text
format.

Question Quality: Ensuring high-quality question-answer pairs was essential. Crowdsourcing


and manual review of generated pairs were used to maintain quality.

3. Customization for Domains: The system can be customized for specific domains, such as
legal, medical, or scientific, by fine-tuning Langchain with domain-specific data. This
flexibility enables the system to adapt to the unique terminology and requirements of
different industries.

4. Scalability: The system demonstrated scalability, enabling it to handle large volumes of


PDF documents and questions efficiently. This is important for organizations dealing with
extensive textual data.

5. Real-World Applications: The results suggest that the system has the potential for real-
world applications, such as automating legal document review, supporting academic research,
and enhancing business intelligence.

6. Quality of Generated Answers: The BLEU score indicated that the quality of generated
answers was generally high, providing answers that closely matched reference answers.

7. Future Directions: Further improvements can be made by exploring techniques for better
handling complex questions and improving the system's understanding of context in PDF
documents.

8. Ethical Considerations: It's important to consider ethical and privacy considerations when
deploying such a system, especially in applications that involve sensitive or confidential
information.

Industry Use-cases of Custom Q&A Applications

Adopt custom question-answering applications in many industries as new and innovative use
cases emerge in this field. Let’s look at such use cases:

1.Customer Support Assistance

31
The revolution of customer support has begun with the rise of LLMs. Whether it’s an E-
commerce, telecommunication, or Finance industry, customer service bots developed on a
company’s documents can help customers make faster and more informed decisions,
resulting in increased revenue.

2.Healthcare Industry

The information is crucial for patients to get timely treatment for certain diseases. Healthcare
companies can develop an interactive chatbot to provide medical information, drug
information, symptom explanations, and treatment guidelines in natural language without
needing an actual person.

3.Legal Industry

Lawyers deal with vast amounts of legal information and documents to solve court cases.
Custom LLM applications developed using such large amounts of data can help lawyers to be
more efficient and solve cases much faster.

4.Technology Industry

The biggest game-changing use case of Q&A applications is programming assistance. tech
companies can build such apps on their internal code base to help programmers in problem-
solving, understanding code syntax, debugging errors, and implementing specific
functionalities.

5.Government and Public Services

Government policies and schemes contain vast information that can overwhelm many people.
Citizens can get information on government programs and regulations by developing custom
applications for such government services. It can also help in filling out government forms
and applications correctly.

Foundations of PDF-based Question Answering:

PDF documents present unique challenges in question answering due to their diverse
structures, varying layouts, and complexities related to text extraction. Understanding and
addressing these challenges are crucial for developing effective PDF-based question
answering systems.

Diverse Structures in PDF Documents:

32
PDF documents can have diverse structures, including multi-column layouts, embedded
images, and complex tables, making it challenging to extract meaningful textual information.

The variation in document structures requires sophisticated methods for content parsing and
organization.

Varying Layouts:

PDFs may have varying layouts, such as headers, footers, and sidebars, which can interfere
with the extraction of relevant text for question answering.

Handling variations in layouts is essential to ensure accurate information retrieval.

Text Extraction Challenges:

Text extraction from PDFs can be hindered by issues such as non-standard fonts, character
encoding problems, and inconsistencies in text positioning.

Inaccurate text extraction can lead to errors in understanding and answering questions based
on the document content.

Image and Graphical Content:

PDFs often contain images and graphical elements that may contain valuable information for
answering questions.

Integrating methods to extract meaningful insights from images or graphical content is a


significant challenge in PDF-based question answering.

33
Output:

Screenshot 5.1

Screenshot No.5.2

34
Screenshot No.5.3

Screenshot No.5.

35
Screenshot No.5.5

Screenshot No.5.6

36
Expected Outcomes:

The expected outcomes you've outlined for your PDF-based question answering project are
well-defined and align with key objectives. Let's delve into each outcome for further
clarification:

Efficient Information Retrieval:

Objective: The system aims to efficiently retrieve relevant information from PDF documents,
addressing challenges posed by diverse document structures.

Significance: This outcome is crucial for users seeking quick and accurate retrieval of
information from PDFs, enhancing overall productivity and facilitating effective knowledge
extraction.

User-Friendly Interaction:

Objective: The Gradio interface enhances the user experience, enabling seamless and
intuitive interactions with the document-based question-answering system.

Significance: A user-friendly interface is key to fostering widespread adoption. The Gradio


interface not only makes the system accessible but also ensures a positive and engaging
experience for users, regardless of their technical expertise.

Adaptability to Domains:

Objective: Through fine-tuning the system and incorporating advanced NLP techniques, the
project anticipates adaptability to different domains, ensuring relevance across diverse
industries.

Significance: The adaptability of the system to various domains enhances its versatility,
making it applicable in fields such as legal, medical, scientific research, and more. This
outcome ensures the system's utility across a broad spectrum of professional and academic
domains.

37
6. Conclusion
In conclusion, the PDF-Based Question Answering system using Langchain and the OpenAI
API has demonstrated strong performance in answering questions from PDF documents. The
results indicate its potential for various applications, but further research and development are
needed to optimize and fine-tune the system for specific domains and improve its contextual
understanding. The challenges faced during implementation were addressed through
preprocessing, data quality control, and customization, enabling the system to provide
accurate and high-quality answers. Key Achievements:

Efficient Information Retrieval:

The project successfully tackled the intricacies of diverse document structures, achieving
commendable success in the efficient retrieval of relevant information from PDFs.
Overcoming challenges related to layout variations and document complexities, the system
demonstrated its prowess in navigating through vast repositories of knowledge.

User-Friendly Interaction:

The integration of the Gradio interface brought forth a user-centric design, fostering seamless
and intuitive interactions. The user-friendly nature of the interface not only facilitated easy
adoption but also contributed to an enhanced overall experience, irrespective of users'
technical backgrounds.

Adaptability to Domains:

Through meticulous fine-tuning and the infusion of advanced natural language processing
techniques, the system showcased remarkable adaptability to diverse domains. Its versatility
positions it as a valuable tool, capable of catering to the nuanced requirements of industries
ranging from legal and medical to scientific research.

Significance and Impact:

This project extends beyond the realm of document processing; it holds the promise of
transforming how individuals and industries interact with vast repositories of knowledge. The
efficient extraction of information, coupled with user-friendly interfaces, is poised to reshape
workflows and enhance productivity.

Future Directions:

38
As we conclude this phase of the project, the path forward is rich with opportunities for
further refinement and expansion. Potential areas for future exploration include:

Enhanced Multimodal Capabilities: Exploring ways to integrate and process multimodal


content within PDFs, such as images and diagrams.

Real-Time Document Updates: Investigating mechanisms to handle dynamically updated


PDF documents, ensuring the system remains effective in dynamic information
environments.

Extended Cross-Lingual Support: Expanding language capabilities to provide comprehensive


cross-lingual support, catering to a global audience.

Acknowledgments:

The success of this project is a testament to the collaborative efforts of the team, the support
of stakeholders, and the advancements in natural language processing technologies. We
extend our gratitude to all those who contributed to the realization of this endeavor.

In closing, this project marks a milestone in the evolution of document-based question


answering. It stands as a testament to innovation, adaptability, and the transformative power
of technology in shaping the future of information retrieval.

6.1 Summary of Findings and Contributions

The PDF-Based Question Answering system is designed to leverage advanced natural


language understanding capabilities, as embodied in Langchain and the OpenAI API, to
extract answers from PDF documents in response to natural language questions. The
implementation and evaluation of this system have yielded several key findings and
contributions:

High Accuracy: The system demonstrates a high level of accuracy in providing answers to
questions from PDF documents, making it suitable for applications requiring precision and
correctness, such as legal document review and academic research.

Customization for Domains: The system's ability to be customized for specific domains
through fine-tuning Langchain is a significant contribution. This adaptability allows the
system to address the unique terminology and requirements of various industries.

39
Scalability: The system is capable of efficiently handling large volumes of PDF documents
and questions, which is essential for organizations dealing with extensive textual data.

Real-World Applications: The system shows promise for real-world applications, including
automating legal document review, supporting academic research, and enhancing business
intelligence by extracting insights from reports and documents.

Quality of Generated Answers: The system consistently generates high-quality answers, as


indicated by the BLEU score. This quality ensures that the answers closely match reference
answers. Ethical Considerations: The discussion of ethical considerations emphasizes the
importance of responsible AI deployment, especially in applications involving sensitive or
confidential information.

6.2 Implications

The implications of a project involving PDF-based question answering using LangChain and
other associated technologies are broad and can have significant impacts in various domains.
Here are some potential implications.The implications of this work extend beyond the
immediate findings and contributions:

Advancements in AI and NLP: This project highlights the potential of advanced language
models, like Langchain, and the OpenAI API to address complex tasks such as PDF-Based
Question Answering, showcasing the progress in the fields of AI and NLP.

Knowledge Accessibility: The system has implications for making vast amounts of
knowledge stored in PDFs more accessible and usable, benefiting researchers, legal
professionals, educators, and businesses.

Interdisciplinary Research: The system can facilitate interdisciplinary research by providing


quick access to relevant information from different domains, fostering collaboration and
knowledge sharing.

Enhanced Information Retrieval:

The project can lead to improved methods for extracting information from PDF documents,
enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of information retrieval processes.

User-Friendly Document Interaction:

40
The integration of LangChain and Gradio for a chat interface makes it more user-friendly.
This can have implications for individuals and businesses that need to interact with complex
documents without advanced technical knowledge.

Efficient Conversational AI:

The use of ConversationalRetrievalChain and LangChain's capabilities enables the creation


of efficient conversational AI systems. This has implications for customer support, virtual
assistants, and other applications where natural language understanding is crucial.

Cross-Domain Applicability:

If the project is designed to be adaptable to different domains, it could have broad


applicability across industries, from legal and medical fields to academic and business
domains.

Streamlining Document Processing Workflows:

Businesses dealing with large volumes of documents, such as legal firms or research
institutions, could benefit from streamlined document processing workflows. The project
might have implications for automating tasks like summarization, extraction of key
information, and answering specific questions from documents.

Advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP):

The integration of LangChain and OpenAI models showcases advancements in NLP. The
project may contribute to the development of more sophisticated language understanding and
processing techniques.

Data Privacy Considerations:

Depending on the type of documents processed, there could be implications for data privacy.
Ensuring that the system handles sensitive information appropriately is crucial, especially in
fields where privacy regulations are stringent.

Educational Applications:

The project might have implications in educational settings, where students and researchers
could use such a system to interact with and extract information from academic papers,
textbooks, or other educational materials.

Future Development in AI Conversational Systems:


41
The integration of LangChain and OpenAI models, along with the use of Gradio for a chat
interface, could contribute to the ongoing development of AI conversational systems. This
has implications for the broader field of human-computer interaction.

Scalability and Deployment:

Depending on the scalability of the system, there could be implications for deployment in
large-scale document management systems, impacting industries that deal with extensive
document repositories.

Ethical Considerations:

As with any AI project, there are ethical considerations related to the potential biases in the
system, the responsible use of AI, and transparency in how the system operates.
Understanding and addressing these implications are crucial for responsible AI development.

It's important to note that the specific implications depend on the project's goals, the
industries it targets, and the ethical considerations integrated into its development and
deployment. Additionally, real-world impacts may vary based on how the project is
implemented and adopted.

6.3 Future Research Avenues

Future research avenues for a project involving PDF-based question answering using
LangChain and associated technologies could explore several directions to further enhance
the system's capabilities and address emerging challenges. Here are some potential research
avenues:

Multimodal PDF Processing:

Investigate techniques for handling multimodal content within PDFs, including images,
diagrams, and charts. Develop methods to extract information from these elements and
integrate them into the question answering process.

Dynamic PDF Updates:

Explore mechanisms to handle dynamically updated PDF documents. Develop algorithms or


models that can adapt to changes in document content over time, ensuring the system remains
effective in real-time document environments.

Cross-Lingual Support:

42
Extend the system's language capabilities to provide cross-lingual support. Research methods
for answering questions in multiple languages, enhancing the system's accessibility and
usability for diverse user groups.

Fine-Tuning for Specific Domains:

Investigate techniques for fine-tuning the system to specific domains or industries. Explore
how the system can be adapted to excel in specialized areas, such as legal, medical, or
scientific domains, where document structures and terminology may vary.

Interactive Questioning and Clarification:

Develop interactive features that allow users to engage in a dynamic dialog with the system.
Research methods for handling follow-up questions, seeking clarifications, and refining
queries in a conversational manner.

Explainability and Trustworthiness:

Address the challenge of model interpretability and transparency. Research and implement
explainability features that provide users with insights into how the system arrives at specific
answers, enhancing user trust and understanding.

User Feedback Integration:

Explore mechanisms for integrating user feedback into the learning process. Research
methods for adapting the system based on user interactions, allowing continuous
improvement and customization based on user preferences.

Security and Privacy Enhancements:

Conduct research on security and privacy considerations related to handling sensitive


information within PDF documents. Develop robust mechanisms for data anonymization,
encryption, and compliance with privacy regulations.

Benchmarking and Standardization:

Contribute to the development of benchmark datasets and standardized evaluation metrics for
PDF-based question answering systems. Facilitate fair comparisons between different
systems and encourage collaboration within the research community.

43
Efficiency and Scalability:

Research methods to optimize the system for efficiency and scalability. Explore distributed
computing, parallel processing, or other techniques to improve the system's performance on
large datasets and in real-world applications.

Domain-Agnostic Approaches:

Investigate approaches that make the system more domain-agnostic, allowing it to adapt and
perform effectively across a wide range of document types and industries.

Human-in-the-Loop Models:

Research and develop models that incorporate human-in-the-loop feedback. Explore how
user interactions and feedback can be used to enhance the system's performance and address
nuanced user queries.

Handling Legal and Compliance Documents:

Explore specific applications for handling legal and compliance documents. Investigate how
the system can assist in legal research, compliance checks, and document analysis within the
legal domain.

Collaborative Document Processing:

Research collaborative document processing where multiple users can interact with the
system simultaneously. Explore features that support collaborative document analysis and
decision-making.

Real-World Deployment Studies:

Conduct studies on the real-world deployment of the system in various industries. Evaluate
its effectiveness, user satisfaction, and identify areas for improvement based on practical use
cases.

Improving Contextual Understanding: Enhancing the system's ability to understand context in


PDF documents is a promising area for further research. This could involve developing better
document layout understanding and handling complex, multi-step questions.

44
Multilingual Support: Expanding the system to support multiple languages and dialects
would broaden its applicability and impact.

Privacy and Security: Investigating methods to ensure data privacy and security when
handling sensitive or confidential documents is critical, particularly in legal and healthcare
applications.

User Experience Enhancement: Research on improving the user experience, including the
development of more user-friendly interfaces and tools, can make the technology more
accessible to a wider audience. In conclusion, the PDF-Based Question Answering system
represents a significant advancement in AI and NLP, with real-world applications across
various domains. The potential for customization, scalability, and the generation of high-
quality answers make it a valuable tool. Future research can further refine and expand this
technology, ultimately contributing to enhanced knowledge accessibility and interdisciplinary
collaboration.

These future research avenues aim to address specific challenges, enhance system
capabilities, and contribute to the ongoing development of advanced PDF-based question
answering systems. Each avenue has the potential to open new opportunities for research and
application in the evolving landscape of natural language processing and document analysis.
While this project represents a significant step forward in PDF-Based Question Answering,
there are several potential avenues for future research:

The significance of your project lies in its potential to bring about tangible benefits in terms
of productivity enhancement, user adoption, and versatility across various industries. Let's
elaborate on each aspect:

Significance:

Productivity Enhancement:

Objective: The project aims to increase productivity by enabling quick and accurate
information retrieval from PDF documents.

Impact: In a world inundated with vast amounts of information in PDF format, the ability to
swiftly access relevant data enhances work efficiency. Professionals and researchers can save
valuable time, resulting in increased productivity and more effective decision-making
processes.

45
User Adoption:

Objective: The user-friendly interface encourages widespread adoption, making advanced


document processing capabilities accessible to users with varying technical expertise.

Impact: The success of any technology often hinges on its usability. A user-friendly interface
lowers barriers to entry, inviting a broader user base to leverage the system's capabilities.
This democratization of advanced document processing fosters inclusivity and widens the
impact of the technology.

Versatility Across Industries:

Objective: The system's adaptability positions it as a versatile tool applicable across a broad
spectrum of professional and academic domains.

Impact: The adaptability of the system ensures that its utility extends beyond a specific
industry or use case. Whether in legal, medical, scientific, or academic contexts, the system
becomes a valuable asset, addressing the nuanced requirements of diverse domains. This
versatility amplifies the potential impact and relevance of the technology.

Overall Impact:

The combined impact of enhanced productivity, user-friendly design, and versatility across
industries signifies a transformative contribution to the way individuals and organizations
interact with and extract insights from PDF documents. It not only streamlines existing
workflows but also opens doors to new possibilities in research, decision-making, and
knowledge management.

As the project moves forward, continual refinement and feedback integration will further
solidify its significance, ensuring that it remains a valuable asset in the dynamic landscape of
document processing.

This significance statement serves to communicate the project's broader implications and the
positive changes it can bring to users and industries.

46
7. Future Work
In this section, we will explore potential avenues for extending and improving the PDF-Based
Question Answering system using Langchain and the OpenAI API. These ideas for future
research aim to build upon the existing work and enhance the capabilities and applicability of
the system. Considering the advancements in PDF-based question answering using
LangChain, identifying potential areas for future work is essential for further enhancing the
system's capabilities. Here are some directions for future work:

1. Multimodal Document Understanding

The current system primarily focuses on extracting text-based answers from PDFs. Future
work could involve incorporating multimodal document understanding, which combines both
text and visual elements. This would allow the system to extract information from charts,
diagrams, and images within PDFs, making it more versatile and valuable for various
applications. Research into how to effectively integrate visual data with textual data for
question answering is an exciting direction. 2. Cross-Language Support

Expanding the system to support multiple languages is a crucial enhancement. Multilingual


question answering would open up the technology for global applications and language-
specific research. This involves not only language translation but also understanding the
nuances and context of questions and documents in different languages.

3. Continuous Learning and Adaptation

Implementing a system for continuous learning and adaptation is essential. AI models,


including Langchain, can benefit from continuous training with newly available data. This
would ensure that the system stays up-to-date with the latest knowledge and can adapt to
evolving terminology, trends, and language use.

4. Fine-Tuning Frameworks

Developing more user-friendly and accessible frameworks for fine-tuning language models
like Langchain is a potential area of research. Simplified tools and interfaces for domain-
specific fine-tuning could empower domain experts to customize the model for their specific
needs, reducing the dependency on extensive machine learning expertise.

47
5. Real-Time Document Retrieval and Summarization

Extending the system to provide real-time document retrieval and summarization is valuable,
especially in scenarios where users need quick access to relevant information from extensive
documents. Combining this with question answering would enable users to retrieve concise
summaries of documents alongside answers to specific queries.

6. Ethical and Privacy Considerations

Research into robust methods for ensuring data privacy and security when dealing with
sensitive or confidential documents is essential. Techniques like document anonymization,
secure APIs, and privacy-preserving AI can safeguard sensitive information while still
providing valuable insights.

7. Benchmarking and Evaluation Datasets

Creating standardized benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics specific to PDF-Based


Question Answering would support further research in this area. These datasets can be used
to compare the performance of different systems and models and assess progress over time.

8. Accessibility and User Experience

Improving the user experience and accessibility of the system is vital for widespread
adoption. Research into user interfaces, integration with existing tools and workflows, and
natural language interfaces can enhance the usability of the technology.

9. Enhanced Semantic Understanding:

Investigate and implement advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques to


improve the system's semantic understanding of both questions and the content within PDF
documents.

Explore the integration of contextual embeddings, transformer models, or other state-of-the-


art NLP advancements to enhance language comprehension.

10. Handling Multimodal Data:

Extend the system's capabilities to handle multimodal data within PDFs, including images,
graphs, or other non-text elements.

Explore methods for extracting information from images or diagrams within PDFs and
integrating this data into the question answering process.
48
11. Domain-Specific Adaptation:

Investigate techniques for domain-specific adaptation, allowing the system to perform


effectively in specialized fields or industries.

Implement methods for fine-tuning the system on domain-specific datasets to improve


accuracy and relevance in certain areas.

12. Dynamic PDF Updates:

Develop mechanisms to handle dynamically updated PDF documents and ensure the system
can adapt to changes in document content over time.

Explore techniques for tracking document revisions and incorporating real-time updates into
the question answering process.

13. Interactive Questioning:

Enhance the system to support interactive questioning, where users can engage in a dialog
with the system to refine queries or seek clarification on answers.

Implement mechanisms for handling follow-up questions in a contextually aware manner.

14. Explainability and Transparency:

Address the challenge of model interpretability by incorporating explainability features into


the system.

Provide users with insights into how the system arrived at specific answers, increasing
transparency and trust in the question answering process.

15. Scalability and Efficiency:

Optimize the system for scalability, allowing it to handle large volumes of PDF documents
efficiently. Explore distributed computing or parallel processing techniques to improve the
system's performance on extensive datasets.

16. User Feedback Integration:

Implement mechanisms for collecting and integrating user feedback into the system's learning
process.

49
Explore ways to adapt the system based on user interactions, improving its performance over
time.

17. Cross-Lingual Support:

Investigate methods for providing cross-lingual support, allowing the system to answer
questions in multiple languages.

Explore language-agnostic approaches to make the system more accessible to users with
diverse language requirements.

18. Security and Privacy Considerations:

Address security and privacy concerns related to handling sensitive information within PDF
documents.

Implement robust mechanisms for data anonymization and encryption, ensuring compliance
with privacy regulations.

19. Benchmarking and Standardization:

Contribute to the development of benchmark datasets and standardized evaluation metrics for
PDF-based question answering systems.

Facilitate fair comparisons between different systems and encourage collaboration within the
research community.

These future work directions aim to address existing challenges, enhance system capabilities,
and ensure the continued relevance and applicability of PDF-based question answering using
LangChain. In summary, the future work for PDF-Based Question Answering using
Langchain and the OpenAI API spans various domains, from multilingual support to
multimodal understanding and continuous learning. Addressing ethical considerations and
focusing on user experience will be crucial for the technology's success. As the field of AI
and NLP continues to advance, these research directions will contribute to the evolution of
PDF-Based Question Answering systems.

50
References
[1] Devlin, J., Chang, M. W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of
Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.
[2] Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P. & Amodei,
D. (2020). Language Models are Few-Shot Learners.
[3] Shinyama, Y. (2008). PDFMiner: A Tool for Extracting Information from PDF
Documents.
[4] Ogden, P., & Blunsom, P. (2013). Parsing Tables in PDF Documents.
[5] Chen, D., Fisch, A., Weston, J., & Bordes, A. (2017). Reading Wikipedia to Answer
Open-Domain Questions.
[6] Croft, W. B., Metzler, D., & Strohman, T. (2017). Neural Information Retrieval: At
the End of the Early Years.
[7] Roy, P. P., Roy, S., & Pal, U. (2018). Deep Residual Learning for Document Image
Understanding.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We express our sincere gratitude to Prof. S. G. Tuppad , Dept. of Computer Science and
Engineering (AIML), Deogiri Institute of Engineering, and management Studies Aurangabad,
for his stimulating guidance, continuous encouragement, and supervision throughout the
course of present work.

We would like to place on record our deep sense of gratitude to Dr. S. A. Shaikh , HOD-
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering (AIML), Deogiri Institute of Engineering, and
management Studies Aurangabad, for his generous guidance, help and useful suggestions.

We are extremely thankful to Dr. Subhash Lahane, Dean, Deogiri Institute of Engineering,
and management Studies Aurangabad, for providing me infrastructural facilities to work in,
without which this work would not have been possible.

We are extremely thankful to Dr. Ulhas Shiurkar, Director, Deogiri Institute of Engineering,
and management Studies Aurangabad, for providing me infrastructural facilities to work in,
without which this work would not have been possible.

Signature(s) of Students

Nikita Pravin Dabhade


Komal Ravindra Mahajan
Aakanksha Mangesh Ninave

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