Glossary
Information retrieval is the finding and ranking of material relevant to a question. Measure that separately from how good the generated answer reads.
Updated 21 Aug 2026
Retrieval quality and answer quality get reported as a single number. An answer can read well from the wrong passages, and a system can retrieve perfectly then summarise badly. Measured together, neither problem is visible.
Ask for a worked example on your own material, and the evidence needed to reproduce it.
We use “Information retrieval” only where a product mechanism or an evaluation method backs it up, and we say when the behaviour depends on how a deployment is configured.
Pick a real piece of work, agree what a good answer looks like, then go through the results together.