##
Feature Extraction

Feature extraction is the task of converting a text into a vector (often called “embedding”).

Example applications:

- Retrieving the most relevant documents for a query (for RAG applications).
- Reranking a list of documents based on their similarity to a query.
- Calculating the similarity between two sentences.

> For more details about the `feature-extraction` task, check out its dedicated page! You will find examples and related materials.

###
Recommended models

- thenlper/gte-large: A powerful feature extraction model for natural language processing tasks.

Explore all available models and find the one that suits you best here.

###
Using the API

Language

Client

Provider

Settings

    import os
    from huggingface_hub import InferenceClient

    client = InferenceClient(
        provider="hf-inference",
        api_key=os.environ["HF_TOKEN"],
    )

    result = client.feature_extraction(
        "Today is a sunny day and I will get some ice cream.",
        model="intfloat/multilingual-e5-large",
    )

###
API specification

####
Request

Headers |  |
--- | --- | ---
authorization | string | Authentication header in the form `'Bearer: hf_****'` when `hf_****` is a personal user access token with “Inference Providers” permission. You can generate one from your settings page.

Payload |  |
--- | --- | ---
inputs* | unknown | One of the following:
(#1) | string |
(#2) | string[] |
normalize | boolean |
prompt_name | string | The name of the prompt that should be used by for encoding. If not set, no prompt will be applied. Must be a key in the `sentence-transformers` configuration `prompts` dictionary. For example if `prompt_name` is “query” and the `prompts` is {“query”: “query: ”, …}, then the sentence “What is the capital of France?” will be encoded as “query: What is the capital of France?” because the prompt text will be prepended before any text to encode.
truncate | boolean |
truncation_direction | enum | Possible values: Left, Right.

####
Response

Body |  |
--- | --- | ---
(array) | array[] | Output is an array of arrays.

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