AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is query expansion?
Query expansion: Adding related words, synonyms or generated variants to a query so that retrieval covers several phrasings of the same need. It raises the chance of matching a relevant document that uses different terms from the user's own question.
Query expansion: an example
'car loan' is expanded to 'car loan OR vehicle finance OR auto loan'.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Query rewriting
- RAG evaluation
- Ragas
- RAPTOR
- Re-embedding
- Recall-latency trade-off
- Reciprocal rank fusion
- Recursive character splitting
Where you learn it
Query expansion is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.