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What is Retrieval?

A plain-English explanation of Retrieval (Information Retrieval) — what it means, why it matters, and how it is used in AI.

Retrieval
Information Retrieval
Retrieval in the context of AI refers to the process of fetching relevant documents, passages, or data from a knowledge base to provide accurate context for a language model's response.
"When a user asks a RAG-powered chatbot a question, the retrieval step searches thousands of documents and returns the most relevant passages."

Also known as: Information retrieval, document retrieval, semantic retrieval

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Why does Retrieval matter?

Retrieval is the foundation of RAG systems that answer questions from private or real-time data sources.

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