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AI & Machine Learning · Advanced

Contextual Retrieval

Prepending chunk-specific context, generated from the whole document, to each chunk before embedding and indexing.

Definition

Described by Anthropic, contextual retrieval adds a short explanation situating each chunk within its source document, used for both embeddings and BM25. It significantly reduces retrieval failures, and combining it with reranking reduces them further.

Exam tip

Adding document context to chunks before indexing improves retrieval of chunks that are ambiguous on their own.

Related terms