N NexChron

Retrieval

Definition The process of fetching relevant documents, passages, or data from an external store in response to a query, used to ground AI model responses in specific, up-to-date information. Retrieval is the first stage of RAG pipelines and semantic search systems.

In Depth

Retrieval can be sparse (BM25 keyword matching), dense (embedding-based semantic similarity), or hybrid (combining both). The quality of retrieval — precision, recall, and latency — directly determines the quality of generated answers in RAG systems. Re-ranking models, which re-score retrieved passages by relevance, are often layered on top of initial retrieval to improve precision before passing context to the LLM.

Browse more terms

AI Agent AI Alignment Agentic AI Artificial General Intelligence Artificial Superintelligence Attention Mechanism AutoML Benchmark Bias (AI) Chain-of-Thought Computer Vision Deepfake Diffusion Model Edge AI Embedding Federated Learning Few-Shot Learning Fine-Tuning Function Calling GPT