DIRECTION

A cone from the origin — thematic alignment regardless of magnitude.

DIRECTION defines a cone in embedding space. A message matches when its embedding points the same way as the direction vector, within a half-angle of cone radians — however strongly or weakly it does so.

MATCH DIRECTION(["customer frustration", "billing complaint"]) CONE 0.4
NAMESPACE "org:acme-corp"
WINDOW 48h

{
  "match": { "direction": { "toward": ["customer frustration", "billing complaint"], "cone": 0.4 } },
  "namespace": { "include": ["org:acme-corp"] },
  "window": "PT48H"
}

Fields

Why magnitude is ignored

This is the clause with no keyword-search equivalent, and the reason to reach for SemQL at all.

Embedding magnitude tends to track how strongly a text is about something. A one-line aside about a billing problem and a detailed complaint thread point in roughly the same direction but at very different magnitudes. A sphere (DISTANCE) separates them; a cone does not.

Use DIRECTION when you are watching for a subject and want the passing mention as well as the essay. Use DISTANCE when you want the essay.

cone is a half-angle in radians

Not degrees, and not a similarity. The valid range is [0, π], and a smaller value is stricter — the opposite direction from within, because this is genuinely an angle.

The default of 0.3 radians is about 17°.

Multiple anchors average

When toward is an array, the direction vector is the normalized mean of the embedded concepts. That is a single averaged direction, not a union: listing concepts that point different ways produces a mean between them that may resemble none of them.

For "this or that", use two DIRECTION clauses joined with OR instead.

At most 8 anchors may appear in the list — see limits.

Grammar

direction_clause = "DIRECTION" "(" anchor_list ")" [ direction_opts ] ;
direction_opts   = "CONE" number ;

Errors