Lexical retrieval
Matching text through words, stems, or character features.
What Lexical retrieval does not show
It excels at exact strings and fails when relevant material uses vocabulary the query never shares.
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 · 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
Questions about Lexical retrieval
What is Lexical retrieval?
Matching text through words, stems, or character features.
What does Lexical retrieval not show or guarantee?
It excels at exact strings and fails when relevant material uses vocabulary the query never shares.
Which area of the glossary does Lexical retrieval belong to?
Retrieval engineering: How pages become chunks, vectors and candidates inside an answer engine, and why being retrieved is not being cited.
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See it in the full glossary · 731 terms across 19 areas.