Natural language search best practices

ThoughtSpot Sage enables customers to ask business questions in natural language, and get AI-generated answers back in the search results page. This guide provides tips to help you get the best performance from the natural language search feature. For more information about natural language search, see Natural language search.

Early Access

Natural language search is an Early Access feature and is disabled by default. To enable it, contact your administrator. Once enabled, your ThoughtSpot administrator can grant you access to this feature by assigning the Can preview ThoughtSpot Sage user privilege to your user group.

Worksheet best practices

Follow these best practices when creating Worksheets to get the best natural language search accuracy:

  • Worksheets should have 50 columns or fewer.

  • Worksheets should have exactly one distinct use case.

  • Avoid overlapping column names.

  • Use underscores or spaces when naming columns.

  • Use easily understandable names.

  • Add synonyms by enabling the AI-generated Worksheet synonyms feature, or create your own synonyms.

  • Worksheets should have a maximum of two date columns.

  • Worksheet values should be flattened lists or single items, not json.

  • Adjust the index priority for your most popular columns, so ThoughtSpot prioritizes those columns when generating Answers.

Search best practices

Follow these best practices when searching using natural language for the most accurate Answers:

  • Don’t use personal pronouns, such as "I," "My," "Mine." GPT can’t understand them using the data we send it. Instead, use identifiers that exist in your data sources, such as names, email addresses, and so on.

  • Don’t ask "why" questions that require reasoning or text-based answers. For example, don’t ask "Why did my sales go down in Q2?" These questions aren’t currently supported.

  • Don’t ask descriptive questions about the data source. For example, don’t ask "How many date columns does the Worksheet have?"

  • Don’t ask overly ambiguous questions. The more precise the question, the more likely you are to get an accurate answer. Use actual column names, if you know them.

  • Don’t ask questions that Search data can’t answer. ThoughtSpot must be able to express your question in search tokens. For example, don’t ask common knowledge questions, or business questions that require text answers.

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