Negative property boosting

General
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1

Currently, Weaviate supports property boosting where certain fields can be given a higher weight during hybrid or BM25 searches. However, in some use cases, I want to do the opposite , de-emphasize or negatively boost certain fields so that they contribute less to the final ranking.

Questions:

  1. Is negative property boosting (or down-weighting) currently on the roadmap?

  2. If not, is there any recommended workaround today (e.g., pre-processing, query composition, reranker logic, or custom scoring modules) to achieve this effect?

2

hi @nikhil1728 !!

I believe you can achieve that by setting a high weight only for the ones you want to be positive.

So let’s say you have 4 properties, and want to negatively boost two of them, using weighted query:

query_properties=[“negative1”, “negative2”, “positive1^10”, “positive2^10”]

I recall some discussion on improving this syntax, allowing for example [“*”, “positive1^5”], meaning: query into all properties, but positive1 is weighted at 5.

This because now, if you want to use the weighted feature, you need to explicitly add all properties that will be queried.

AFAIK, this is not in our roadmap. Please, feel free to add a GH feature request, so we can track it and understand how popular with our community this feature is.

Thanks!

3

Thanks!!
will try this workaround

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