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Glossary

What is recall and precision?

Recall is the share of relevant items a system found; precision is the share of what it found that was relevant. Neither counts until you define relevant.

Updated 21 Aug 2026

01

Where this one gets misread

Quoted alone, either number is meaningless. Perfect precision is available to anyone willing to return a single result. Both need the reference set and somebody's definition of relevant attached.

02

Questions to ask

Ask for a worked example on your own material, and the evidence needed to reproduce it.

  • Measured against which reference set?
  • Who judged relevance, and by what rule?
  • Where is the trade-off set, and can you change it?
  • What does the whole curve look like, not the one point?
03

How Marella uses the term

We use “Recall and precision” 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.

  • Backed by a product mechanism or an evaluation method
  • Deployment differences flagged

What this page does not prove

  1. B1A definition is not a claim about how the product performs.
  2. B2Vendor implementations vary.
  3. B3Test the term against a representative workflow.

Test the claim on your documents

Pick a real piece of work, agree what a good answer looks like, then go through the results together.