Tagged “information-retrieval”

5 posts.

All Model Architecture19 Training & Alignment22 Inference & Serving18 Agents & Orchestration11 Reasoning & Evaluation26 Safety, Security & Governance7 Platforms & Practice20

Platforms & Practice 24 min

BM25 Refuses to Die: The Probabilistic Relevance Framework Behind Search's Most Durable Baseline

In 2021 a benchmark of 18 retrieval datasets found that a scoring function from 1994 still beat most neural retrievers outside their training domain. BM25 is not a heuristic that got lucky. It is a deliberate approximation of a p…

classical-ir information-retrieval ranking retrieval ∑ ◫

Platforms & Practice 24 min

Query Understanding Is the Hidden Half of Search: From Broder's Taxonomy to LLM Query Rewriting

An LLM-written pseudo-document lifts BM25 by 15 nDCG@10 points on TREC DL 2019, and turns a 16 ms search into one that waits over two seconds for the model. Query understanding decides what the engine searches for before ranking …

query-understanding information-retrieval retrieval rag ∑ ◫

Platforms & Practice 10 min

Retrieval Is a Ranking Problem: Why Your RAG System Doesn't Need a Better Embedding Model

Teams tune the embedding model and the vector database, then wonder why answers are still wrong. Both are the least important parts of the stack. Retrieval is a two-stage ranking problem, and information retrieval solved the shap…

rag retrieval reranking chunking ∑ ◫

Reasoning & Evaluation 24 min

The Curse of Dimensionality: Why Distances Stop Meaning Anything, and Why Learning Works Anyway

Scatter 1,000 random points in a 1,000-dimensional cube and the farthest one from a query is only about 12% farther away than the nearest. By that arithmetic nearest-neighbour search should be meaningless, and yet every vector da…

supervised-classical learning-theory embeddings vector-search ∑ ◫

Platforms & Practice 24 min

What Structure Buys You: Knowledge Graphs in the Age of Language Models

In 2019 a masked language model recalled facts almost as well as a relation extractor with an oracle entity linker, and people asked whether knowledge graphs were finished. They were not, but the reason is narrower than their adv…

knowledge-graphs rag retrieval hybrid-retrieval ∑ ◫