Vector index
A data structure that accelerates nearest-neighbor lookup over embeddings.
What Vector index does not show
Its configuration trades recall, latency, memory, and update cost rather than maximizing all four.
Terms this definition uses
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 · 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 · 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 Vector index
What is Vector index?
A data structure that accelerates nearest-neighbor lookup over embeddings.
What does Vector index not show or guarantee?
Its configuration trades recall, latency, memory, and update cost rather than maximizing all four.
Which area of the glossary does Vector index belong to?
Retrieval engineering: How pages become chunks, vectors and candidates inside an answer engine, and why being retrieved is not being cited.
← Vector database · Sparse vector →
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