Glossary · Retrieval & generation
Hybrid Retrieval
Retrieval that combines signals from different methods, commonly lexical matching and dense-vector similarity, before merging or reranking results.
Why it matters
Exact identifiers, rare terms, and semantic paraphrases behave differently, so one retrieval signal can miss useful evidence.
In practice
Retrieve candidates with both BM25-style keyword search and embeddings, merge their ranks, then rerank the combined set for the user query.
Common confusion
Hybrid retrieval combines candidate signals. A reranker applies a second relevance model to candidates already retrieved.
Related terms
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