Definition
A failure state in RAG pipelines where the retrieved document chunks lack the specific semantic relevance required to answer a user's query, despite having high mathematical similarity scores. This often necessitates a trade-off between retrieval latency and precision, as solving it usually requires compute-heavy re-ranking steps.
Focuses on 'Content Relevance' rather than 'Context Window' size limitations.
"A researcher being handed a stack of high-quality medical journals when they actually asked for a history of the printing press."
- Cosine Similarity(Prerequisite)
- Re-ranking(Mitigation Strategy)
- Semantic Gap(Underlying Cause)
- Precision@K(Measurement Metric)
Conceptual Overview
A failure state in RAG pipelines where the retrieved document chunks lack the specific semantic relevance required to answer a user's query, despite having high mathematical similarity scores. This often necessitates a trade-off between retrieval latency and precision, as solving it usually requires compute-heavy re-ranking steps.
Disambiguation
Focuses on 'Content Relevance' rather than 'Context Window' size limitations.
Visual Analog
A researcher being handed a stack of high-quality medical journals when they actually asked for a history of the printing press.