Query expansion
Query expansion is an information-retrieval technique that adds related terms, variants, or reformulations to a query to improve retrieval.
AI-Powered Search
Query expansion is a retrieval technique that augments a query with additional terms or representations to improve matching with relevant content.
- How it is used
- Improves retrieval or ranking when relevant documents use terms related to, rather than identical to, the user's query.
- How deep it goes
- Works through SKG traversal, weighted query construction, and alternative matching requests; introduces SPLADE-style output without building its model.
- Examples
- Uses boosted “advil” alternatives, a “vibranium” SKG traversal, category-specific senses of “chef,” and SPLADE++ token outputs.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via SKG traversal and search requests to generate weighted terms and choose matching or ranking strategies.
The Art of AI Product Development
A retrieval technique that adds terms, variants, or related subqueries to an original search query to improve retrieval results.
- How it is used
- Improves RAG retrieval when users submit vague or poorly structured questions.
- How deep it goes
- Explains rewriting and expansion through concrete subqueries, but stops short of implementation details.
- Examples
- Uses AI-trends questions, SaaS platforms, workflow automation, and classification by technical, market, or integration intent.
- What you can do after
- Apply query expansion to turn broad user questions into targeted retrieval subqueries.
Read how The Art of AI Product Development explains query expansion →
Related concepts
- knowledge graphused by · A knowledge graph is a graph-structured representation of entities and their semantically meaningful relationships, often including associated attributes or facts.
- recallmeasures · Recall is the proportion of all relevant or actually positive items that a system successfully retrieves or correctly identifies.
- retrieval-augmented generationproduced by · Retrieval-augmented generation is a technique that retrieves relevant information from external sources and supplies it as context to a generative model when producing an output.
- planningalternative to · Planning is the process of formulating and organizing intended actions or steps toward a goal, often accounting for dependencies, conditions, or constraints.
- similarity searchused by · Similarity search is a retrieval technique that finds or ranks items by comparing their representations with a query according to a similarity or distance measure.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.