Build a News Recommendation App from Python with Vespa
Part 2 — From news search to news recommendations with embeddings
In this part, we’ll start transforming our application from news search to news recommendation using the embeddings created in this tutorial. An embedding vector will represent each user and news article. We will make the embeddings used available for download to make it easier to follow this post along. When a user comes, we retrieve his embedding and use it to retrieve the closest news articles via an approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. We also show that Vespa can jointly apply general filtering and ANN search, unlike competing alternatives available in the market.
We assume that you have followed the news search tutorial. Therefore, you should have an app_package variable holding the news search app definition and a Docker container named news running a search application fed with news articles from the demo version of the MIND dataset.
Add a user schema
We need to add another document type to represent a user. We set up the schema to search for a user_id and retrieve the user’s embedding vector.
We build an index for the attribute field user_id by specifying the fast-search attribute. Remember that attribute fields are held in memory and are not indexed by default.
The embedding field is a tensor field. Tensors in Vespa are flexible multi-dimensional data structures and, as first-class citizens, can be used in queries, document fields, and constants in ranking. Tensors can be either dense or sparse or both and can contain any number of dimensions. Please see the tensor user guide for more information. Here we have defined a dense tensor with a single dimension (d0 - dimension 0), representing a vector. 51 is the size of the embeddings used in this post.
We now have one schema for the news and one schema for the user.
['news', 'user']Index news embeddings
Similarly to the user schema, we will use a dense tensor to represent the news embeddings. But unlike the user embedding field, we will index the news embedding by including index in the indexing argument and specify that we want to build the index using the HNSW (hierarchical navigable small world) algorithm. The distance metric used is euclidean. Read this blog post to know more about Vespa’s journey to implement ANN search.
Recommendation using embeddings
Here, we’ve added a ranking expression using the closeness ranking feature, which calculates the euclidean distance and uses that to rank the news articles. This rank-profile depends on using the nearest neighbor search operator, which we’ll get back to below when searching. But for now, this expects a tensor in the query to use as the initial search point.
Query Profile Type
The recommendation rank profile above requires that we send a tensor along with the query. For Vespa to bind the correct types, it needs to know the expected type of this query parameter.
This query profile type instructs Vespa to expect a float tensor with dimension d0[51] when the query parameter ranking.features.query(user_embedding) is passed. We’ll see how this works together with the nearestNeighbor search operator below.
Redeploy the application
We made all the required changes to turn our news search app into a news recommendation app. We can now redeploy the app_package to our running container named news.
Waiting for configuration server.
Waiting for configuration server.
Waiting for configuration server.
Waiting for configuration server.
Waiting for configuration server.
Finished deployment.["Uploading application '/app/application' using http://localhost:19071/application/v2/tenant/default/session",
"Session 7 for tenant 'default' created.",
'Preparing session 7 using http://localhost:19071/application/v2/tenant/default/session/7/prepared',
"WARNING: Host named 'news' may not receive any config since it is not a canonical hostname. Disregard this warning when testing in a Docker container.",
"Session 7 for tenant 'default' prepared.",
'Activating session 7 using http://localhost:19071/application/v2/tenant/default/session/7/active',
"Session 7 for tenant 'default' activated.",
'Checksum: 62d964000c4ff4a5280b342cd8d95c80',
'Timestamp: 1616671116728',
'Generation: 7',
'']Feeding and partial updates: news and user embeddings
To keep this tutorial easy to follow, we make the parsed embeddings available for download. To build them yourself, please follow this tutorial.
We just created the user schema, so we need to feed user data for the first time.
For the news documents, we just need to update the embedding field added to the news schema.
Fetch the user embedding
Next, we create a query_user_embedding function to retrieve the user embedding by the user_id. Of course, you could do this more efficiently using a Vespa Searcher as described here, but keeping everything in python at this point makes learning easier.
The function will query Vespa, retrieve the embedding and parse it into a list of floats. Here are the first five elements of the user U63195's embedding.
[0.0,
-0.1694680005311966,
-0.0703359991312027,
-0.03539799898862839,
0.14579899609088898]Get recommendations
ANN search
The following yql instructs Vespa to select the title and the category from the ten news documents closest to the user embedding.
We also specify that we want to rank those documents by the recommendation rank-profile that we defined earlier and send the user embedding via the query profile type ranking.features.query(user_embedding) that we also defined in our app_package.
Here are the first two hits out of the ten returned.
[{'id': 'index:news_content/0/aca03f4ba2274dd95b58db9a',
'relevance': 0.1460561756063909,
'source': 'news_content',
'fields': {'category': 'music',
'title': 'Broadway Star Laurel Griggs Suffered Asthma Attack Before She Died at Age 13'}},
{'id': 'index:news_content/0/bd02238644c604f3a2d53364',
'relevance': 0.14591827245062294,
'source': 'news_content',
'fields': {'category': 'tv',
'title': "Rip Taylor's Cause of Death Revealed, Memorial Service Scheduled for Later This Month"}}]Combine ANN search with query filters
Vespa ANN search is fully integrated into the Vespa query tree. This integration means that we can include query filters and the ANN search will be applied only to documents that satisfy the filters. No need to do pre- or post-processing involving filters.
The following yql search over news documents that have sports as their category.
Here are the first two hits out of the ten returned. Notice the category field.
[{'id': 'index:news_content/0/375ea340c21b3138fae1a05c',
'relevance': 0.14417346200569972,
'source': 'news_content',
'fields': {'category': 'sports',
'title': 'Charles Rogers, former Michigan State football, Detroit Lions star, dead at 38'}},
{'id': 'index:news_content/0/2b892989020ddf7796dae435',
'relevance': 0.14404365847394848,
'source': 'news_content',
'fields': {'category': 'sports',
'title': "'Monday Night Football' commentator under fire after belittling criticism of 49ers kicker for missed field goal"}}]Conclusion and future work
We turned our news search app into a news recommendation app by storing user profiles in Vespa. The user profile in this case was chosen to be the embeddings generated by a ML model trained on data about the user’s browsing history. We then used those user profiles to recommend news articles according to an approximate nearest neighbor search. Future work will focus on evaluating if the results obtained by the news recommendation app are aligned to what was expected by the ML model used to generate the embeddings.
