AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is colBERT?
ColBERT: A retrieval model using late interaction: it encodes queries and documents into per-token vectors and scores with a maximum-similarity operation. It offers accuracy near cross-encoders with far faster search, at the cost of larger index storage.
ColBERT: an example
A ColBERT index stores about 100 small vectors for a 100-token passage, instead of one.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Context ordering
- Context precision
- Context recall
- Context relevance
- Contextual chunk enrichment
- Contextual retrieval
- Conversational RAG
- Corrective RAG
Where you learn it
ColBERT is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.