Tagged “dense”
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Filtering before or after you retrieve
A metadata predicate applied after the search returns an empty list; applied before, it changes what the search means. Neither is free.
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What vector search misses
Identifiers, rare terms, negation and exact phrases. Five query classes where embeddings return plausible neighbours instead of the document you asked for.
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Searching with a hypothetical answer
Generate a fake answer, embed that instead of the question, and search with it. Why the trick works, and the three ways it misfires.
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Why a similarity threshold doesn't travel
The cut-off that worked on your test queries fails on the next batch. What a cosine score is comparable to, and what to threshold instead.
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Typos, and which retriever forgives them
A misspelling deletes a lexical match and blurs a dense one. Fuzzy matching, correction, and why the fix depends on which word was misspelled.
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When the query and the document aren't in the same language
Term matching across languages scores zero. Multilingual embeddings, translating the query, and why a mixed-language corpus fails per language.
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When every document looks the same to the vector index
On a homogeneous corpus, dense scores compress and ranking becomes arbitrary. How to spot a low-contrast corpus and what still discriminates.