retriever

Definition

The component that pulls candidate documents out of a corpus for a given query. In retrieval-augmented generation the retriever feeds a generator that reads the passages and writes the answer, so end-to-end accuracy is capped by whether the retriever surfaced a passage containing the answer at all. Implementations divide into sparse lexical scoring such as BM25 and dense embedding search.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: It Takes Two to Match — Co-Evolving Both Sides of Retrieval with RLIt Takes Two to Match: Co-Evolving Generative Retriever with Reinforcement Learning