Turning meaning into numbers.
THE DEFINITION
Text converted into a list of numbers representing its meaning.
Similar meanings produce similar numbers, even with different words.
WHY THAT IS USEFUL
It allows searching by meaning rather than by exact words.
A search for "how do I reset my password" finds a document titled "changing your login credentials".
WHERE THEY ARE USED
Semantic search Retrieval for question-answering Recommendation Clustering and categorisation Detecting near-duplicate content
THE LIMITATION
Similarity is not relevance. Two passages can be similar and neither answer the question.
WHY YOU MIGHT ENCOUNTER THE TERM
Any system searching your documents to feed a language model uses them.
RELATED TERMS
Retrieval augmented generation, semantic search, vector database.
