Knowledge base
Also: knowledge library
A set of records a system can search. It might hold guides, case notes, or other source files.
The model answers from whatever it absorbed in training, like an exam from memory.
The app first finds the relevant pages in your documents and puts them in front of the model, like an open-book exam with page references.
Open book is better, but the student can still misread the page, and the search can hand it the wrong page. The page reference is what lets you check.
The fuller definition
A knowledge base is an organized collection intended for retrieval and reuse, such as approved precedents, explanations, or procedures.
Go deeper
- Question“What is the notice period?”
- RetrieveSearch the indexed documents; pull the best-matching passages.
- GenerateThe model answers from the question plus those passages.
- CiteEach statement points to the passage it came from.
Two things can still go wrong: the search misses the clause that matters, or the model misreads the clause it was given. The citation lets you check which happened.
A concrete example
A precedent library stores issue tags, document versions, and notes about when an example is appropriate.
The distinction that matters
Collecting files is not enough; useful reuse needs search, provenance, maintenance, and access controls.
Related terms
RAG — Retrieval-augmented generation
Letting the model look things up in your documents before answering, and show where the answer came from. Like an open-book exam.
Documents & retrievalMetadata
Information about a file rather than its contents, such as its author, date, and page count.
Documents & retrievalKnowledge graph
A map of things and how they connect, such as people, companies, and events, with lines between them.
Where it is taught
How document-grounded AI answers workSource and further reading
Sentence Transformers · Semantic searchThe definition and example are written for this library. The link gives background, official documentation or legal authority as labelled. Legal scope depends on the jurisdiction and current text; product features depend on release and settings.