Understanding boosting

To improve retrieved results and customize the end user chat experience, Amazon Q enables you to map attributes to fields in your Amazon Q Business index.

Amazon Q Business offers two kinds of attributes:

• Reserved or default – Reserved attributes are based on document attributes that commonly occur in most data. You can use reserved attributes to map commonly occurring document attributes in your data to Amazon Q Business index fields.

• Custom – You can create custom attributes to map document attributes that are unique to your data to Amazon Q Business index fields.

Document attributes can be mapped to index fields using either the Amazon Q console or the API:

• Use the API – Before you use the API, you must first create an index. Next, create index fields. Then, to ingest documents into your Amazon Q Business index, use the CreateDataSource or BatchPutDocument API operations.

• Use the console – You can choose to map document attributes from your data sources when you connect your data source to Amazon Q Business. When you use the console, Amazon Q Business automatically maps data source document fields to Amazon Q Business index fields internally.

Document attributes—both reserved and custom—can only be of the following data types: DATE, NUMBER, STRING, and STRING_LIST. To use STRING and STRING_LIST type document attributes for boosting on the console and the API, they must be enabled for search. To enable these attributes, use the DocumentAttributeConfiguration object of the UpdateIndex API operation. If you don't enable search on these attributes, you can't boost attributes of these data types on either the Amazon Q Business console or the API.

To customize and control boosting for document attributes, use the boostingOverride parameter of the NativeIndexConfiguration object of the UpdateRetriever API operation.

For more information about Amazon Q Business document attributes and how to map them, see Document attributes and types.