Technical GlossaryNatural Language Processing

Hybrid Retrieval

An approach that combines sparse and dense retrieval signals to provide more balanced search quality.

Hybrid retrieval has become one of the most practical and powerful strategies in modern information-access systems. It combines the exact term-matching strength of sparse methods with the semantic coverage of dense methods. This is especially effective in enterprise RAG, document search, and expert knowledge systems. It demonstrates that different retrieval paradigms can complement one another.