Building LLM Applications using LangChain
Chapter 1: Introduction to the LangChain Framework
The Motivation for a Framework
LangChain's Core Architecture
Setting Up Your Development Environment
Your First LangChain Application
Chapter 2: Models, Prompts, and Parsers
Interfacing with LLMs and Chat Models
Managing Prompts with PromptTemplates
Implementing Few-Shot Prompting
Structuring Output with Parsers
Hands-on Practical: Building a Structured Data Extractor
Chapter 3: Constructing Chains for Sequential Operations
Fundamentals of Chains
Using the Simple LLMChain
Creating Sequential Chains
Implementing Conditional Logic with Router Chains
Hands-on Practical: A Content Generation Pipeline
Chapter 4: Memory for Conversational Applications
The Importance of State in Conversations
Buffer Memory for Short-Term Recall
Summarization Memory for Long Conversations
Using Windowed and Token-Based Memory
Adding Memory to Chains and Agents
Practice: Building a Chatbot with Memory
Chapter 5: Data Connection for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
Architecture of a RAG System
Loading Data with Document Loaders
Splitting Documents for Processing
Vector Stores and Embeddings
Fetching Data with Retrievers
Building a Question-Answering Chain
Hands-on Practical: Q&A over Your Documents
Chapter 6: Developing Autonomous Agents
Introduction to Agents and Tools
The Agent, Tool, and Toolkit Architecture
Using Built-in Tools
Creating Custom Tools
Exploring Agent Types and Executors
Hands-on Practical: A Web-Searching Agent
Splitting Documents for Processing
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- LangChain Text Splitters, LangChain Development Team, 2024 (LangChain) - Official documentation detailing various text splitting strategies within LangChain, including
RecursiveCharacterTextSplitterandTokenTextSplitter, essential for practical implementation. - Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks, Patrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandra Piktus, Fabio Petroni, Vladimir Karpukhin, Naman Goyal, Heinrich Küttler, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel, Douwe Kiela, 2020 NeurIPS 2020 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2005.11401 - This paper introduces the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, providing the theoretical context for why breaking down documents into manageable chunks is a fundamental preprocessing step for efficient information retrieval.
- Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts, Nelson F. Liu, Kevin Lin, John Hewitt, Ashwin Paranjape, Michele Bevilacqua, Fabio Petroni, Percy Liang, 2023 Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2307.03172 - Investigates the performance of language models when dealing with long input contexts, identifying the 'lost in the middle' phenomenon that chunking strategies aim to overcome by providing focused text segments.