Can users ask follow up questions?

[markenki]

Is there a way to enable users to ask follow up questions? For example, the user asks "What is the main contribution of paper X?". PaperQA answers. But then the user may want to ask "What are some other contributions?" (without having to specify "paper X" again.). Is there a way to do that easily?

[dosubot[bot]]

PaperQA includes a session management feature through the PQASession class, which helps in tracking the context of user interactions. This class maintains a list of Context objects that hold the context of a question, including a summary of the text and a score. This setup allows for maintaining conversational context across multiple queries, which can facilitate handling follow-up questions without needing to specify the context again ^[1][2][3].

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[markenki]

Could you give an example of what the API call would look like for the follow up question.

[dosubot[bot]]

I wasn't able to find specific details about the API call structure for submitting follow-up questions in the PaperQA repository. However, the PQASession class is designed to manage session context, which suggests that follow-up questions can be handled within the same session by maintaining the context of previous interactions. If you have access to the repository, you might want to look into the implementation of the PQASession class for more details on how to structure such API calls.

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[markenki]

Yeah, when I issue a follow up query, how do I specify the same session (or a new session)? There doesn't seem to be a way to do that in agent_query, for example. Hmmm.

[dosubot[bot]]

To specify the same session or start a new session when issuing a follow-up query, you can use the session_id parameter in the PaperQAEnvironment class. This parameter allows you to pass a UUID that identifies the session. When you want to continue with the same session, you would reuse the same session_id. If you want to start a new session, you would generate a new UUID.

Here's a brief overview of how it works:

1. Continuing the Same Session: Use the same session_id that was used in the initial query. This ensures that the context is maintained across queries.

2. Starting a New Session: Generate a new UUID for the session_id to start a fresh session without any previous context.

The session_id is used in the make_initial_state method of the PaperQAEnvironment class to initialize the PQASession with the session ID ^[1].

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