Adding ? at the end of the question

[marcominerva]

Out of curiosity, why in the SearchClient.cs a question mark is always add at the end of the question?

kernel-memory/service/Core/Search/SearchClient.cs

Line 375 in 60440d6

question = question.EndsWith('?') ? question : $"{question}?";

I mean, even if the question isn't really "interrogative" (let's say for example Tell me what is the distance between the Earth and the Moon), a question mark is always added.

[dluc]

it's a question of semantics, to lead the model into generating an answer. It's an old approach to be honest, for models like GPT3. There's some new logic that should be added between the user question and the model.

[marcominerva]

So adding the question mark shouldn't be necessary anymore, and instead we should think about a new approach?

[dluc]

Unless it causes problems, the question mark is useful with weaker models, e.g. when using Ollama. About the new/better approach, yes, but there's no need to reinvent it IMO, there's a lot of literature and examples. The plan is/was to implement a "cognitive planner", see old pic:

[marcominerva]

OK, now the scenario is clear, thank you. One last thing: in the embedding retrieval step, the question is use as is:

kernel-memory/service/Core/Search/SearchClient.cs

Line 229 in 60440d6

text: question,

As this is related to vector calculation, I think that the presence of a question mark at the end does not influence the result, is it?