Build Gpt Powered Chatbots Around Enterprise Data With Python

Introduction

Traditionally most chatbots were a tree of if-else blocks. Some had a layer of sophistication where users’ intent was captured, to decide which function should be triggered. However, the tech was never good enough to resolve an actual query — until now. After GPT-3, we've seen how large language models are able to formulate near-human answers.

In this tutorial, we'll index documents, create a GPT-powered bot on top of it, and finally expose it as an API.

Context + LLM

These LLMs like ChatGPT aren't trained on enterprise data. They are general purpose models, created to chat and complete sentences.

To solve this problem, you don’t need to fine-tune these models. Instead, the better solution is to pass some knowledge along with the question. Let me give you an example.

We're "what is the top speed?" to ChatGPT:

Both answers are correct, however, the second one is more useful for the customer.

The next challenge here is to get the “knowledge”, and use it to set the context for the LLM, along with the question. For this, we can use a retriever. Imagine you’ve database of all possible information about the car. You can perform a lexical search and find the rows that might have the answer. Then, pass these rows along with the customer’s question to the LLM.

Here's how the complete flow will look like —

In the above example, we scanned the DB for the words "top" and "speed", concatenated the results together. For a better experience, we also added some instruction (to keep the answer concise) with the original question the customer asked. Put everything together, passed to the LLM and boom — we have the answer.

Indexing

In this exercise, we’ll build a simple bot that answers questions about the Mercedes-Benz A-Class Limousine.

Get their brochure here

Now companies don't have such pristine tables about the product information. They are available in the form of documents like the one above.

So, the first step is to create a database or a search index. To extract the text, we’ll use PyPDF2:

pip install PyPDF2

from PyPDF2 import PdfReader
import csv

SOURCE_FILE = "The Mercedes-Benz A-Class Limousine.pdf"
OUTPUT_CSV = "Mercedes-Benz-A-Class-Limousine.csv"

reader = PdfReader(SOURCE_FILE)

n_pages = len(reader.pages)

header = False # file is empty, so no header row is present
for n in range(n_pages):
    page = reader.pages[n]
    text = page.extract_text()

    with open(OUTPUT_CSV, "a+") as f:
        writer = csv.DictWriter(f, fieldnames=["page", "content"])
        if not header:
            writer.writeheader()
            header = True # header row added

        writer.writerow({"page": n + 1, "content": text.lower()})
        f.close()

This creates a CSV file. To KISS, we'll use this CSV file + pandas as our index with our own version of retriever.

Retriever

Let's create a class Retriever which will be responsible for retrieving results based on customer query. The class will have the following functionalities:

• Removing stopwords
  Stopwords are common words like "a", "the", "in", etc., that don’t contribute to the search; negatively impact it more often than not. For example, if someone asks you "what are the top features of the car", you'll ignore most of the words in the question, and only look for the word "features".

stopwords = [...] 
return [word for word in words if word not in stopwords]

• Filtering top rows
  Once we have extracted all the rows with matching keywords, we'll prioritise those with higher frequency of the keywords. This also becomes important considering the token limit of LLMs.

df = pd.read_csv('Mercedes-Benz-A-Class-Limousine.csv')

# add a column frequency which will contain the sum of frequencies of keywords words
df["freq"] = sum([df['content'].str.count(k) for k in keywords])

# sort the dataframe by frequency of keywords
rows_sorted = df.sort_values(by="freq", ascending=False)

• Retrieve
  The actual retrieve function which will be responsible for giving us the context based on customer query.

query = "top speed"

# select all rows where the content column contains the words "top" or "speed"
df = df.loc[df['content'].str.contains("top|speed")]

return f"{''.join(top_rows['content'])}"

Let's put everything into the class:

import pandas as pd


class Retriever:
    def __init__(self, source, searchable_column):
        self.source = source
        self.searchable_column = searchable_column
        self.index = pd.read_csv(source)

    @property
    def _stopwords(self):
        return [
            "a",
            "an",
            "the",
            "i",
            "my",
            "this",
            "that",
            "is",
            "it",
            "to",
            "of",
            "do",
            "does", 
            "with",
            "and",
            "can",
            "will",
        ]

    def remove_stopwords(self, query):
        words = query.split(" ")
        return [word for word in words if word not in self._stopwords]

    def _top_rows(self, df, keywords):
        df = df.copy()
        df["freq"] = sum([df[self.searchable_column].str.count(k) for k in keywords])
        rows_sorted = df.sort_values(by="freq", ascending=False)
        return rows_sorted.head(5)

    def retrieve(self, query):
        keywords = self.remove_stopwords(query.lower())
        query_as_str_no_sw = "|".join(keywords)

        df = self.index
        df = df.loc[df[self.searchable_column].str.contains(query_as_str_no_sw)]
        top_rows = self._top_rows(df, keywords)

        return f"Context: {''.join(top_rows['content'])}"

Now, we can easily instantiate this class :

r = Retriever(
   source="Mercedes-Benz-A-Class-Limousine.csv", searchable_column="content"
)
context = r.retrieve(query)

LLM

The next step is to pass this context to an LLM. We'll use SOTA gpt-3.5-turbo model. You'll need an OpenAI API key for this, which you can get here.

Here's a sample OpenAI API Request:

OAI_BASE_URL = "https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions"
API_KEY = "sky0urKey"

CONTENT_SYSTEM = "You're a salesman at Mercedes, based on the query, create a concise answer."

def llm_reply(prompt: str) -> str:
    data = {
        "messages": [
            {"role": "system", "content": CONTENT_SYSTEM},
            {"role": "user", "content": prompt},
        ],
        "model": "gpt-3.5-turbo",
    }

    response = requests.post(
        OAI_BASE_URL,
        headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}"},
        json=data,
    ).json()

    reply = response["choices"][0]["message"]["content"]

    return reply

messages is a list of dictionaries. Each dictionary has two keys — role and content. The "system" role sets a role for the bot, and works like an instruction. We'll pass our messages under role "user".

Let's ask our first question about the A Class Limousine:

query = "What is the size of alloy wheels?"

r = Retriever(
   source="Mercedes-Benz-A-Class-Limousine.csv", searchable_column="content"
)
context = r.retrieve(query)

reply = llm_reply(f"{context}\nquery:{query}")

🎉 Congrats! You successfully created your a GPT-powered bot from a PDF file.

FastAPI application

Let's expose our function as an endpoint using FastAPI.

We're also mounting a static directory, and rendering templates to integrate this API with an UI.

r = Retriever(
    source="Mercedes-Benz-A-Class-Limousine.csv", searchable_column="content"
)
context = r.retrieve(query)
prompt = context + "\n" + "Query:" + query
return llm_reply(prompt=prompt)

We will use uvicorn to run the app:

uvicorn main:app --port 8080 --reload

You can go to localhost:8080/docs and send a sample request from Swagger UI or simply send a curl request:

curl -X 'POST' \
  'http://127.0.0.1:8080/chat' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "query": "What is the size of alloy wheel?"
}'

Now that the API is live, you can connect it to your frontend. For this tutorial, I used this beautiful design on codepen (Credits: abadu).

Demo

Link to the complete source code is attached below.

Challenges & Next steps

• Retriever: As we discussed, there's scope of improvement in the retriever. For e.g., you can implement a function for spell check, or integrate the whole thing with some cloud based service like Azure Cognitive Services.

• Ring fencing: Improve the prompt/system instructions so that the bot is constrained to answer only Mercedes-related questions, and politely declines other questions.

• Chat history: The current bot doesn't send historical messages. Also, it doesn't recognise follow-up questions. For example, I should be able to ask "what other devices" (follow-up question) after asking "can i connect my iphone?". Hence, you should identify follow-up questions, and also send chat history.

References & Further Readings

• Source code
• OpenAI API Reference