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Technical GlossaryNatural Language Processing

Dense Passage Retrieval

A retrieval method that maps queries and passages into dense vectors to find relevant passages within documents.

Dense Passage Retrieval enabled an important leap especially in open-domain QA and RAG architectures. Retrieving at the passage level rather than the full-document level can capture answer-relevant context more effectively. This improves quality by making the retrieval unit more granular. It is one of the core methods for effective retrieval over large knowledge collections.