AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is sentence window retrieval?
Sentence window retrieval: Embedding individual sentences but, at retrieval time, returning each matched sentence together with a fixed number of sentences before and after it. This gives precise matching with local context and avoids storing large chunks.
Sentence window retrieval: an example
A matched sentence is returned with 3 sentences on each side, giving the model 7 sentences of context.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Similarity threshold
- Small-to-big retrieval
- Sparse retrieval
- Structure-aware chunking
- Synthetic test set
- Table extraction
- Text extraction
- Top-k retrieval
Where you learn it
Sentence window retrieval is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.