Glossary · Retrieval engineering
Lexical retrieval
Matching text through words, stems, or character features. It excels at exact strings and fails when relevant material uses vocabulary the query never shares.
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 · HNSW · 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 · 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
← Late interaction · Semantic search →
See it in the full glossary · 579 terms across 19 areas. Scan a site to see which of these apply to it.