AI Glossary Term

What does “Retrieval” mean?

Definition

Finding relevant documents or records from a knowledge source for a query.

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How Retrieval works

Example

When you ask a documentation chatbot how to reset a device, it first retrieves the three most relevant help pages from thousands before anything is written.

Why it matters

Finding the right information is the first step to answering from sources. Poor retrieval leads to poor answers even with a good model.

Common questions

Keyword vs semantic retrieval?

Keyword retrieval matches exact words. Semantic retrieval matches meaning, often through embeddings.

How is retrieval judged?

By whether the right documents appear near the top, using measures such as precision and recall.

Is retrieval the same as search?

Closely related. In AI systems the term usually refers to fetching content to feed into a model.

Knowledge BaseA curated collection of documents or records used for retrieval, support automation, or grounding responses.Retrieval PrecisionThe proportion of retrieved items that are relevant to the user's query.RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)A method that retrieves external knowledge and feeds it into generation at inference time.RAG-FusionA retrieval method that generates multiple query variants, retrieves results for each, and fuses the rankings.Continual LearningTraining approaches that let a model keep learning from new data without forgetting prior knowledge.DistillationCompressing knowledge from a large teacher model into a smaller student model.

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Retrieval Quality Music Information Retrieval Dense Passage Retrieval BM25 and Lexical Retrieval

Test yourself

Retrieval Quality Quiz Music Information Retrieval Quiz Dense Passage Retrieval Quiz