Sparse vector
A high-dimensional representation in which most values are zero, often preserving lexical features.
What Sparse vector does not show
It supports exact terminology but does not inherently understand paraphrases.
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 · 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 · 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 Sparse vector
What is Sparse vector?
A high-dimensional representation in which most values are zero, often preserving lexical features.
What does Sparse vector not show or guarantee?
It supports exact terminology but does not inherently understand paraphrases.
Which area of the glossary does Sparse vector belong to?
Retrieval engineering: How pages become chunks, vectors and candidates inside an answer engine, and why being retrieved is not being cited.
← Vector index · Dense vector →
See it in the full glossary · 772 terms across 19 areas.
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