Quick Answers · Plain English RAG Glossary
Plain English definitions for the terms you keep hearing.
Get an understanding of pure terms like RAG pipeline, embedding, vector database, RAGAS,
and more. We have defined each service and term used on this page in simple wording for
your convenience.
What are RAG development services?
RAG development services architect knowledge based response giving
systems. It connects language models such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, Jais, and Falcon to
your confidential files. This system extracts relevant answers from your query and
prevents hallucinated responses by sourcing references. The process covers ingestion,
chunking, embeddings, retrieval, reranking, analysis, and governance while adhering to
PDPL and DIFC regulations in the UAE.
What is RAG?
RAG stands for retrieval augmented generation. It is a technique the
system uses to present cited and well grounded answers at the same time a query is
raised. This approach connects a search system with language models.
What is a RAG pipeline?
The RAG pipeline comprises a series of actions:
ingestion, chunking, embedding, storage, retrieval, reranking, and generation.
This E2E flow affects response accuracy, although a live RAG pipeline also includes
evaluation, guardrails, and monitoring.
What is chunking?
Chunking is a process in which documents are broken down into smaller
pieces of information while maintaining retrieval precision. Each segmented section is
large enough to have meaningful content, yet chunk size and strategy play a role in
retrieval quality.
What is an embedding?
Embeddings are numeric based vector representations of text meaning.
Alike words hold similar meaning; this is exactly where vector search looks for relevant
topics for a query response.
What is a vector database?
The leading vector databases, including Pinecone, Weaveviate, Qdrant,
pgvector, and Milvus store embeddings. They find the relevant information in response to
the raised query and serve as a retrieval engine which is the backbone of RAG
development.
What is hybrid search?
Sometimes pure vectors may ignore a few searches; this is where
Hybrid search reflects its importance in RAG. It combines dense vectors
and keyword based search analysis and yields better results.
What is reranking?
Reranking is the process of ranking passages before generation. It uses
a cross encoder model to match the exact query relevance for reordering retrieved
passages. This process blocks irrelevant information to maintain the accuracy of the
answer.
What is an agentic RAG?
Agentic RAG is a modern AI method that advances retrieval strategies
through planning, autocorrection, research, simplification of complex tasks, and tool
use. This procedure neglects the practice of a single search for query responses.
What is GraphRAG?
GraphRAG is an advanced search method that retrieves knowledge graphs
rather than passage based results. This search system allows cascading reasoning across
connected units, especially when information is available in bulk via linked files.
What is RAG evaluation (RAGAS)?
RAGAS is a well known framework used for RAG evaluation. The evaluator
ranks accuracy using context precision, recall, faithfulness, or answer relevance
criteria, and Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment (RAGAS) scores gate releases.
What is faithfulness / grounding?
Faithfulness is a metric that determines whether the query response is
factual and well cited before answering. A well grounded and faithful answer serves as
a defense against hallucinated responses and prevents the deliberate generation of AI
fake answers.