Definition
A ranking function used in Information Retrieval to estimate the relevance of documents to a given search query based on term frequency (TF) and inverse document frequency (IDF). In RAG pipelines, it serves as the primary algorithm for lexical or 'sparse' retrieval, utilizing saturation parameters to prevent high-frequency terms from overly dominating the relevance score.
Lexical keyword matching based on exact tokens, distinct from semantic vector similarity.
"A specialized sieve that catches specific, rare 'keyword' nuggets while allowing common 'stopword' sand to pass through, adjusted to ensure that larger buckets of text don't unfairly outweigh smaller ones."
- TF-IDF(Mathematical Predecessor)
- Hybrid Search(Implementation Framework)
- Sparse Retrieval(Methodology Category)
- Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF)(Scoring Component)
Conceptual Overview
A ranking function used in Information Retrieval to estimate the relevance of documents to a given search query based on term frequency (TF) and inverse document frequency (IDF). In RAG pipelines, it serves as the primary algorithm for lexical or 'sparse' retrieval, utilizing saturation parameters to prevent high-frequency terms from overly dominating the relevance score.
Disambiguation
Lexical keyword matching based on exact tokens, distinct from semantic vector similarity.
Visual Analog
A specialized sieve that catches specific, rare 'keyword' nuggets while allowing common 'stopword' sand to pass through, adjusted to ensure that larger buckets of text don't unfairly outweigh smaller ones.