Glossary · Phase 1 · Building with LLMs
Mean reciprocal rank
A search score: for each test question, 1 ÷ the rank of the first right document, averaged. 1 means the right one always comes first.
Try it now
When an answer is wrong, first ask which of the two failed. The fixes are completely different.
Learn it properly
Making RAG good · Hybrid search, reranking and citations. About 30 minutes.
Other terms from the same lesson
- BM25: The standard keyword-search score: it rewards documents that use the question's words, especially rare words, without over-rewarding repeats.
- hit rate: The share of test questions where the right document appears in the top k results.
- hybrid search: Combining keyword search with embedding search, so you get both exact-word matches and matches in meaning.
- keyword search: Finding documents that contain the words in the question. It catches exact names and codes that meaning-based search can miss.
- reciprocal rank fusion: A simple way to merge two ranked lists: each document scores 1 ÷ (60 + its rank) in each list, and the scores are added.
- reranker: A slower, more careful model that re-orders the top search results by how well each one actually answers the question.
- stopwords: Very common words such as "the" and "a" that keyword search ignores because they say little about what a document is about.
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