AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is document loader?
Document loader: A component that reads raw sources such as PDFs, web pages, spreadsheets or database exports and converts them into plain text plus metadata for a RAG pipeline. Good loaders preserve structure like headings and tables, since lost structure makes later chunks harder to retrieve.
Document loader: an example
A PDF loader extracts text from a 40-page annual report and records page numbers as metadata for each section.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Domain adaptation of embeddings
- efConstruction
- efSearch
- Embedding
- Embedding cache
- Embedding drift
- Exact nearest neighbour search
- FAISS
Where you learn it
Document loader is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.