Reference · Glossary
Retrieval
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The step that **finds relevant documents or chunks** before the model generates an answer — the "R" in RAG.
When to use
Any Q&A over your own docs, tickets, wikis, or product manuals.
When not to
When the model's general knowledge is enough and stale/wrong retrieval would add noise.
Example
Question: "What's the enterprise SLA?" → embed query → top-3 policy chunks → prompt includes those chunks.