Understanding Evidence View in Axon

What is Evidence?

Evidence is the collection of documents and data used by the models when generating answers to your natural language query. When a user asks a question in Axon, the knowledge graph populates answers to this query as individual nodes in the knowledge graph. Each node on your knowledge graph can be considered an answer to your query, and the evidence for a given answer is provided through an Evidence View.

The Evidence View displays all unstructured documents used by the models as evidence for a given answer. For additional context around an answer, any structured data about a given answer is also provided, so users can quickly reference additional properties for a given entity (see below for more information).

Evidence View Breakdown

Here is an example Evidence View for the answer “fever”, which is an answer generated for the query “What are symptoms of covid-19?”.

From top to bottom, the Evidence View displays:

  1. The question asked in the Axon search bar (“What are symptoms of covid-19?”).
  2. The total number of unique answers that Axon generated based on the data in your data fabric.
  3. The answer generated by the model, which is be the same as the node found in your knowledge graph.
  4. The answer’s supporting evidence, including the document it came from, as well as the paragraph where the answer was derived.**Note: In instances where an answer can have several pieces of evidence, the Evidence View shows one document, and all other supporting evidence is displayed in the “Show More” section underneath. In this scenario, you can see the answer “fever” has 73 additional supporting pieces of evidence.

Supporting Evidence: NER & Answer Highlighting

For each document defined as supporting evidence, you will see several additional layers of metadata and deep learning applied. Here’s a breakdown of how to interpret highlighting and additional metadata.

Here is an example evidence section for “hemicentin-1”, an answer to the question “What genes play a role in macular degeneration?”.

From top to bottom, here’s a breakdown of what information is available for an answer’s supporting evidence.

  1. The answer (“hemicentin-1”) is displayed at the top, and shown in the knowledge graph as the node.
  2. The probability scores (Overall Score and Individual Scores) for that answer are displayed.
  3. The Layar instance where that document came from is displayed (e.g. “User Data”, grey)
  4. The official title of the first supporting document, with a hyperlink to the original document.
  5. The paragraph or text snippet where the deep learning algorithms found supporting evidence for an answer. The answer is highlighted in yellow, and any autodetected NER tags are highlighted throughout the text snippet.
  6. If there are additional documents that support the same answer, you will see a “Show More” section, where you can view all remaining evidence for an answer. In this example, there was one more document that supported the answer).

Graph Properties & Structured Database Results

If an answer in your knowledge graph also matches an entry in your connected relational graphs or structured databases, they will be visible in the top right of the Evidence Section.

For example, the answer “ropinirole” matches a node in my Neo4J connector. I can also add any related nodes from that graph database directly into my knowledge graph by clicking the “Add to Graph” button in that section.

For additional inquiries about the Evidence View, please reach out to us at [email protected] for further assistance.