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Glossary · Retrieval engineering

Query rewriting

Transforming a request into a form expected to retrieve better results.

What Query rewriting means

It can clarify intent or silently change it, so the rewritten query should be observable in auditable systems.

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 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 Query rewriting

What is Query rewriting?

Transforming a request into a form expected to retrieve better results.

Which area of the glossary does Query rewriting belong to?

Retrieval engineering: How pages become chunks, vectors and candidates inside an answer engine, and why being retrieved is not being cited.

← Candidate generation  ·  Query expansion →

See it in the full glossary · 772 terms across 19 areas.

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