AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is text extraction?
Text extraction: Turning files such as PDFs, scans or HTML into clean text. Digital PDFs can be parsed directly, while scanned documents need optical character recognition. Bad extraction, such as jumbled columns or dropped tables, produces poor chunks and poor retrieval.
Text extraction: an example
A two-column research paper is extracted so that the left column is read fully before the right, preventing sentences from being interleaved.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Top-k retrieval
- Two-stage retrieval
- Vector database
- Vector index
- Vector normalisation
- Vector quantisation
- Abstention
- Access control in retrieval
Where you learn it
Text 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.