EXPLORE / 06

Terms index

Specialized AI and software-development terms with concise explanations

RECORDS

Entity records

61 records · 2/2

  1. 041

    Query Rewriting

    Query Rewriting leverages LLMs to transform vague, ambiguous, or conversational user queries into structured, explicit search queries or multiple sub-queries, boosting downstream retrieval recall rates.

    Website pending
  2. 042

    Full Re-indexing

    Full Re-indexing parses, chunks, embeds, and re-indexes the entire document corpus from scratch whenever data changes. While eliminating stale data artifacts, it incurs high compute costs and service downtime.

    Website pending
  3. 043

    Incremental Indexing

    Incremental Indexing uses content hashes to re-embed and update only modified document chunks while purging obsolete records, drastically cutting down compute costs and API overhead during frequent knowledge updates.

    Website pending
  4. 044

    Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain

    Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) measures ranking quality by accounting for multi-level relevance scores and logarithmic position decay, providing a comprehensive metric for evaluating search and re-ranking algorithms.

    Website pending
  5. 045

    Mean Reciprocal Rank

    Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) evaluates retrieval system performance by measuring how high the first relevant item appears in search results. It is computed as the mean of reciprocal ranks across a set of query evaluation cases.

    Website pending
  6. 046

    Fixed-size Chunking

    Fixed-size Chunking splits text strictly by token or character counts with sliding overlaps. It offers high throughput and easy implementation, but risks breaking logical paragraph structures, code blocks, and table data.

    Website pending
  7. 047

    Parent-Child Chunking

    Parent-Child Chunking index small child chunks to maximize retrieval precision, and maps matched hits back to larger parent document segments for context assembly, balancing precise candidate matching with contextual completeness.

    Website pending
  8. 048

    Score Normalization

    Score Normalization scales vector and BM25 scores into a standardized 0–1 numerical range before applying weighted sums. While preserving relative score margins, it is susceptible to score distribution skew between different search engines.

    Website pending
  9. 049

    Reciprocal Rank Fusion

    Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) combines ranked lists from multiple search algorithms without requiring score normalization across different scales. It scores documents by summing the reciprocal of their ranks across lists, providing robust hybrid search performance.

    Website pending
  10. 050

    Top-K Similarity

    Top-K Similarity directly truncates top candidates purely based on raw vector distance or keyword matching scores. While highly relevant, it frequently retrieves repetitive context passages when indexing overlapping or redundant documentations.

    Website pending
  11. 051

    Maximal Marginal Relevance

    Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) is a re-ranking algorithm designed to balance relevance and diversity. It penalizes redundant candidates that are overly similar to already selected documents, avoiding top-k results that suffer from low informational diversity.

    Website pending
  12. 052

    Non-parametric Memory

    Non-parametric Memory refers to explicit knowledge stored outside model parameters, such as in vector databases, document repositories, or knowledge graphs. It enables dynamic retrieval during inference, allowing factual updates without modifying model weights.

    Website pending
  13. 053

    Parametric Memory

    Parametric Memory represents knowledge implicitly stored within neural network weights during pre-training and fine-tuning. While offering rapid access, it remains frozen at training cutoffs, requires computationally expensive retraining to update, and is susceptible to factual hallucination without external context.

    Website pending
  14. 054

    Post-filtering

    Post-filtering retrieves top similarity candidates first and then filters out restricted or mismatched items downstream. This approach risks recall collapse when top candidates are filtered out, while causing unnecessary compute overhead and potential security leak windows.

    Website pending
  15. 055

    Metadata Pre-filtering

    Metadata Pre-filtering applies hard scoping constraints (such as tenant ID, permission ACLs, document version, or update timestamp) prior to executing vector or sparse similarity search. It guarantees unauthorized documents never enter candidate pools, enforcing strict multi-tenant access control.

    Website pending
  16. 056

    Cross-Encoder

    Cross-Encoder feeds a concatenated query-document pair into a single Transformer model to perform joint self-attention across all tokens. It provides significantly higher ranking precision but suffers from high computational latency, making it ideal for second-stage re-ranking rather than initial candidate retrieval.

    Website pending
  17. 057

    Bi-Encoder

    Bi-Encoder processes query and document independently into vector embeddings, allowing document vectors to be pre-indexed for fast sub-second nearest neighbor search across massive corpora, though at the expense of missing fine-grained token-level cross interactions.

    Website pending
  18. 058

    Fine-tuning

    Fine-tuning adapts a pre-trained large language model by updating its neural network weights on task-specific dataset. It improves target output formatting, instruction adherence, and domain-specific stylistic behavior, but incurs high retraining costs and cannot guarantee real-time factual accuracy.

    Website pending
  19. 059

    Retrieval-Augmented Generation

    Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) retrieves relevant external knowledge before passing it into a generative language model to produce grounded responses. It mitigates factual hallucinations stemming from static parametric memory, enables fast knowledge updates, and provides verifiable citation sources.

    Website pending
  20. 060

    Sparse Retrieval

    Sparse Retrieval uses high-dimensional sparse representations and inverted indexes (such as BM25) to score text matching based on term frequency. It is highly effective for exact keyword lookup, alphanumeric IDs, and specialized terminology, but fails to match semantically equivalent queries using different words.

    Website pending
  21. 061

    Dense Retrieval

    Dense Retrieval maps text into low-dimensional dense embedding vectors using neural networks and matches content via vector distance metrics. It excels at semantic similarity, paraphrase matching, and conceptual recall, but may miss precise keyword identifiers or exact alphanumeric terms.

    Website pending