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Technical GlossaryNatural Language Processing

Dense Retrieval

A retrieval approach that performs semantic matching by representing queries and documents in a dense vector space.

Dense retrieval prioritizes semantic similarity rather than exact lexical overlap. Even if a query and a document use different words, they can still match if they are semantically close. This is especially important in modern QA, RAG, and semantic search systems. However, strong performance requires high-quality embeddings, the right index structure, and task-aligned training.