Summary
In this chapter, we explored the key role that evaluation plays in building and maintaining RAG pipelines. We discussed how evaluation helps developers identify areas for improvement, optimize system performance, and measure the impact of modifications throughout the development process. We also highlighted the importance of evaluating the system after deployment to ensure ongoing effectiveness, reliability, and performance.
We introduced standardized evaluation frameworks for various components of a RAG pipeline, such as embedding models, vector stores, vector search, and LLMs. These frameworks provide valuable benchmarks for comparing the performance of different models and components. We emphasized the significance of ground-truth data in RAG evaluation and discussed methods for obtaining or generating the ground truth, including human annotation, expert knowledge, crowdsourcing, and synthetic ground-truth generation.
The chapter included a hands-on code lab where...