Retrieval Glossary

Browse 16 retrieval terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

16 Retrieval Terms

AI Index
An index built to support AI workflows, often by storing embeddings, metadata, or searchable representations that help with retrieval and grounding. AI indexes...
AI Search
Search functionality enhanced by AI techniques such as semantic ranking, embeddings, query rewriting, or answer generation. AI search is often designed to...
Approximate Nearest Neighbor
A similarity search method that trades exact recall for much faster lookup in high-dimensional vector spaces. It influences how models are trained, evaluated,...
Context Stuffing
The practice of adding too much material to a prompt or context window in the hope that more information will improve the answer, often with diminishing...
Dense Retrieval
A search approach that retrieves items by comparing learned dense embeddings rather than sparse term overlap. It influences how models are trained, evaluated,...
Dual Encoder
A retrieval architecture that encodes queries and documents separately for fast vector similarity search. It influences how models are trained, evaluated, or...
Matryoshka Embeddings
Embeddings designed so truncated lower-dimensional prefixes still retain useful semantic information, making one vector usable at multiple dimensionalities.
Needle in a Haystack Test
A test that checks whether a model can find and use a small relevant fact buried inside a long context window.
RAG
Retrieval-Augmented Generation — a technique that enhances LLM responses by first retrieving relevant documents from an external knowledge base and including...
RAG Retriever
The retriever component in a retrieval-augmented generation system that selects candidate documents or chunks for the model to use as context. Retriever...
Relevance Score
A score used to estimate how relevant a document, chunk, or answer is to a query or task. Relevance scores are common in search, retrieval, and reranking...
Retrieval Augmented Generation
A pattern where a model first retrieves relevant documents or facts and then uses them while generating an answer.
Retrieval Model
A model used to retrieve relevant information, often by creating embeddings, ranking candidates, or estimating semantic similarity. Retrieval models are...
Retrieval Pipeline
The pipeline that turns a query into retrieved evidence, often including rewriting, embedding, search, ranking, filtering, and context assembly. Retrieval...
Retrieval Quality
How well a retrieval system finds the right information for a given query, considering relevance, freshness, completeness, and ranking order. Retrieval quality...
Retriever
The component in a search or RAG system that fetches candidate information relevant to a query. Retrievers may use embeddings, keywords, hybrid search, or...

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