Metadata Mapping (Advanced Access)

Advance Access (AA) is an opportunity to evaluate and work with Relativity features prior to the General Availability (GA) release. Relativity customers typically participate in AA programs on a feature-by-feature basis. The functionality described in this topic may not be available in all Relativity environments. This topic may not represent the functionality, appearance, or behavior of the GA release version of this feature.

Incorporating metadata mapping helps improve how aiR Assist retrieves documents by allowing the AI model to use structured metadata as part of the retrieval process, in addition to semantic relevance. This leads to more accurate, context appropriate results when answering user questions.

• Without the metadata mapping and usage, aiR Assist often receives questions with constraints not clearly stated in the document, such as sender or recipient email information and date ranges.
• With metadata mapping enabled, aiR Assist can detect these elements in a natural language question and translate them into metadata filters at retrieval time. This ensures that documents considered for the answer align with the user’s intent, not just with similar wording.

aiR Assist uses a hybrid retrieval approach when metadata mapping is configured:

1. Metadata filters are applied first, based on detected entities such as emails and dates.
2. Semantic similarity search is then performed on the filtered set of documents.

By restricting semantic search to documents that already meet the relevant metadata criteria, aiR Assist helps to reduce noise and improves ranking quality. This approach is more precise than relying on semantic search alone. For more information on aiR Assist's usage of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, see Understanding aiR Assist responses.

Without metadata filtering, semantically related but contextually incorrect documents (for example, the wrong time period or sender) may be included in retrieval. This can negatively impact answer quality. Metadata mapping helps ensure that aiR Assist reasons over documents that are valid for the question being asked, reducing the likelihood of incorrect or over generalized responses.

Configuring metadata mapping

Workspace administrators can configure how standard metadata fields are mapped to their specific workspace-related fields, with field names and IDs uniquely assigned to each workspace.

1. Navigate to aiR Assist.
2. Select Metadata Mapping from the hamburger icon in the aiR Assist chat panel.
   
   The Metadata Mapping panel slides open next to the aiR Assist chat panel. To close the panel, click the X opposite the panel heading or click Metadata Mapping again from the hamburger icon.
3. Toggle Enable Metadata Mapping to set up and use metadata in the workspace. By default, the toggle is disabled.
   
4. For each relevant metadata field listed that you want to use, select the appropriate workspace-level field from the corresponding drop-down. The fields listed in the drop-down will vary between workspaces. The first three metadata fields must be configured: Primary Date/Time, Email to, and Email from. Up to five fields total can be configured. Labels appear next to each metadata field indicate the mapped or not mapped status.

   Field	Field type	Required field	Description
   Primary Date	Date	Required	Used to understand when document was created or sent in queries that require date filters.
   Email From	Fixed-length text	Required	Used to identify the email address that sent the email in queries that ask about emails or specific participants.
   Email To	Long text	Required	Used to identify the email addresses to which the email was sent in queries pertaining to emails or specific participants.
   Email CC	Long text	Optional	Used to identify the email addresses included as carbon copy (CC) recipients in queries pertaining to emails or specific participants.
   Email BCC	Long text	Optional	Used to identify the email addresses included as blind carbon copied (BCC) in queries that ask about emails or specific participants.

5. Click Save & update indexes.
6. Click Confirm to proceed with mapping metadata fields and automatically updating all indexes. The re-indexing process may take some time to complete. To view the re-indexing progress, access the Index Manager. For more information on Index Manager, see Indexing data using Index Manager.

Using metadata for queries

The Use Metadata toggle displays in the Ask a question box if Metadata Mapping is enabled. Each user can choose whether or not to leverage metadata for their inquiry by toggling Use Metadata on or off. See Asking a question for details.