Semantic search
Retrieval based on learned meaning representations rather than exact wording alone.
What Semantic search does not show
It finds paraphrases but can return conceptually similar passages that do not answer the question.
Terms this definition uses
Definitions that name Semantic search
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 · Lexical retrieval · 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 Semantic search
What is Semantic search?
Retrieval based on learned meaning representations rather than exact wording alone.
What does Semantic search not show or guarantee?
Retrieval based on learned meaning representations rather than exact wording alone. It finds paraphrases but can return conceptually similar passages that do not answer the question.
Which area of the glossary does Semantic search belong to?
Retrieval engineering: How pages become chunks, vectors and candidates inside an answer engine, and why being retrieved is not being cited.
← Lexical retrieval · Exact-match retrieval →
See it in the full glossary · 731 terms across 19 areas.