How It Works
Retriever
The part of a search or RAG system that fetches the handful of documents most likely to help answer a question, usually by comparing embeddings (vectors). Whatever the retriever misses, the AI never sees.
Origin
Standard information-retrieval vocabulary; the 'retriever + reader/generator' split was made prominent by the 2020 Retrieval-Augmented Generation paper by Patrick Lewis and colleagues at Facebook AI.