Usage Pattern (Retrieval)

Using RetrieverEvaluator

This runs evaluation over a single query + ground-truth document set given a retriever.

The standard practice is to specify a set of valid metrics with from_metrics.

from llama_index.evaluation import RetrieverEvaluator

# define retriever somewhere (e.g. from index)
# retriever = index.as_retriever(similarity_top_k=2)
retriever = ...

retriever_evaluator = RetrieverEvaluator.from_metric_names(
    ["mrr", "hit_rate"], retriever=retriever
)

retriever_evaluator.evaluate(
    query="query", expected_ids=["node_id1", "node_id2"]
)

Building an Evaluation Dataset

You can manually curate a retrieval evaluation dataset of questions + node id’s. We also offer synthetic dataset generation over an existing text corpus with our generate_question_context_pairs function:

from llama_index.evaluation import generate_question_context_pairs

qa_dataset = generate_question_context_pairs(
    nodes, llm=llm, num_questions_per_chunk=2
)

The returned result is a EmbeddingQAFinetuneDataset object (containing queries, relevant_docs, and corpus).

Plugging it into RetrieverEvaluator

We offer a convenience function to run a RetrieverEvaluator over a dataset in batch mode.

eval_results = await retriever_evaluator.aevaluate_dataset(qa_dataset)

This should run much faster than you trying to call .evaluate on each query separately.