HNSW
Hierarchical Navigable Small World, a graph-based approximate-nearest-neighbor index.
What HNSW does not show
Its tuning affects memory, build time, latency, and recall; the acronym is not a quality guarantee.
Related terms in Retrieval engineering
How pages become chunks, vectors and candidates inside an answer engine, and why being retrieved is not being cited.
Corpus · Document ingestion · Data connector · Parsing · OCR · Layout-aware parsing · Semantic chunking · Fixed-size chunking · Chunk overlap · Parent-child retrieval · Metadata filtering · Vector database · Vector index · Sparse vector · Dense vector · Cosine similarity · Dot-product similarity · Approximate nearest neighbor · Top-k · Retrieval recall · Retrieval precision · Mean reciprocal rank · Normalized discounted cumulative gain · Relevance score · Candidate generation · Query rewriting · Query expansion · HyDE · Multi-query retrieval · Reciprocal rank fusion · Late interaction · Lexical retrieval · Semantic search · Exact-match retrieval · Freshness boosting · Authority weighting · Source diversity · Deduplication · Near-duplicate detection · Semantic cache · Retrieval latency · Retrieval cutoff · Citation mapping · Answer synthesis
Questions about HNSW
What is HNSW?
Hierarchical Navigable Small World, a graph-based approximate-nearest-neighbor index.
What does HNSW not show or guarantee?
Its tuning affects memory, build time, latency, and recall; the acronym is not a quality guarantee.
Which area of the glossary does HNSW belong to?
Retrieval engineering: How pages become chunks, vectors and candidates inside an answer engine, and why being retrieved is not being cited.
← Approximate nearest neighbor · Top-k →
See it in the full glossary · 731 terms across 19 areas.