AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is table extraction?
Table extraction: Recovering rows and columns from tables in PDFs or images so their cells stay linked to their headers. Plain text extraction often flattens tables into meaningless number strings, so RAG over financial or scientific documents depends on doing this well.
Table extraction: an example
A fee schedule table is converted to rows such as 'Savings account | Minimum balance | Rs 10,000' so a query about minimum balance can match it.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Text extraction
- Top-k retrieval
- Two-stage retrieval
- Vector database
- Vector index
- Vector normalisation
- Vector quantisation
- Abstention
Where you learn it
Table extraction is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.