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MarkMarinetoday at 2:26 AM1 replyview on HN

This depends on your users and doc corpus. On finance docs and with users that use jargon and acronyms heavily, BM25 can fail on trivial queries... you end up encoding a masters in economics into the query re-writing logic.

Double hard if you're dealing with private market finance customers with their own ideas on what "common" terms mean. I tried to replace the embedding/ingestion pipeline multiple times and nothing I tried was better over a large amount of documents. Performance sucked, the agent was re-writing and re-trying queries over and over until it found what it wanted, and vector search with a little work up front was worlds better (though it was expensive)


Replies

rao-vtoday at 5:02 AM

A frontier LLM based query rewriter has atleast a masters in economics, and a pretty good understanding of finance informal language. How long ago did you try this? I'd be curious if you find this still to be the case.