Collapsing/expanding query results - Amazon Kendra
Collapsing resultsChoosing a primary document using sort orderMissing document key strategyExpanding resultsInteractions with other Amazon Kendra features

Collapsing/expanding query results

When you connect Amazon Kendra to your data, it crawls document metadata attributes—like _document_title, _created_at, and _document_id—and uses these attributes or fields to provide advanced search capabilities during query time.

Amazon Kendra's Collapse and expand query results feature allows you to group search results using a common document attribute and display them—either collapsed or partially expanded—under a designated primary document.

Note

The collapse and expand query results feature is currently available only via the Amazon Kendra API.

This is useful in the following kinds of search situations:

  • Multiple versions of content exist in documents within your index. When your end user queries the index, you want them to see the most relevant version of the document with duplicates hidden/collapsed. For example, if your index contains multiple versions of a document named "NYC leave policy" you can choose to collapse the documents for the specific groups "HR" and "Legal" using the "Type" attribute/field.

    Example 1

  • Your index contains multiple documents with unique information about one kind of item or object, like a product inventory, for example. To capture and sort item information conveniently, you want end users to access all documents linked by an item or object as one search result. In the example below, a customer search on "animal print shirts" returns results grouped by name, and sorted by ascending price order.

    Example 2

Collapsing results

To group similar or related documents together, you must specify the attribute to collapse on (for example, you can collapse/group documents by _category). To do this, call the Query API and use the CollapseConfiguration object to specify the DocumentAttributeKey to collapse on. The DocumentAttributeKey controls which field search results will be collapsed upon. Supported attribute key fields include String and Number. String list and Date type are not supported.

Choosing a primary document using sort order

To configure the primary document to display for a collapsed group, you use the SortingConfigurations parameter under CollapseConfiguration. For example, to get the most recent version of a document, you would sort each collapsed group by _version. You can specify up to 3 attributes/fields to sort by and a sort order for each attribute/field using SortingConfigurations. You can request a quota increase for the number of sort attributes.

By default, Amazon Kendra sorts query responses by the relevance score that it determines for each result in the response. To change the default sort order, make document attributes sortable and then configure Amazon Kendra to use these attributes to sort responses. For more information, see Sorting responses.

Missing document key strategy

If your document doesn't have a collapse attribute value, Amazon Kendra offers three customization options:

  • Choose to COLLAPSE all documents with null or missing values in one group. This is the default configuration.

  • Choose to IGNORE documents with null or missing values. Ignored documents will not appear in query results.

  • Choose to EXPAND each document with a null or missing value into a group of its own.

Expanding results

You can choose whether collapsed search result groups expand using the Expand parameter in the CollapseConfiguration object. Expanded results maintain the same sort order that was used to select the primary document for the group.

To configure the number of collapsed search result groups to expand, you use the MaxResultItemstoExpand parameter in the ExpandConfiguration object. If you set this value to 10, for example, only the first 10 out of 100 result groups will have expand functionality.

To configure the number of expanded results to show per collapsed primary document, use the MaxExpandResultsPerItem parameter. For instance, if you set this value to 3, then at most 3 results per collapsed group will be displayed.

Interactions with other Amazon Kendra features

  • Collapsing and expanding results doesn't change the number of facets or impact the total number of results displayed.

  • Amazon Kendra featured search results won't be collapsed even if they have the same field value as the collapse field you configure.

  • Collapsing and expanding results only applies to results of type DOCUMENT.