What is reranking? Reassessing relevance among retrieved candidates
Understand reranking through feature documentation, including candidate retrieval, cross-encoders, semantic rankers, missing evidence, latency, and citations.
Understand the concept
Reranking reassesses retrieved candidates to place more relevant evidence earlier, using a model or other scoring method. It cannot automatically recover absent candidates. Scores are not factual probabilities; results can be stale or inapplicable, so keep provenance and inspect generation.
Retrieve candidates before more detailed comparison
An offline-support query may retrieve installation instructions and limitations. Reranking can compare query and passages more closely to prioritize limitations. It cannot judge a missing limitation passage it never received.
Sentence Transformers describes Cross-Encoder-based retrieve-and-rerank, while Azure reranks existing results. Inputs and limits differ by implementation, so service-specific candidate counts are not universal. No model was run or accuracy gain measured.
Detailed comparisons need complete conditions and suitable inputs
Short chunks can separate conclusions from qualifications, leaving rerankers incomplete meaning. Check headings and scope. Long inputs can exceed limits; full documents are not automatically more reliable.
Models differ in query-document, language, and task suitability. Verify support and your questions. Changed order does not establish complete business understanding; enforce permissions and versions separately.
Evaluate evidence and latency as well as ordering
Compare relevant positions over identical candidates and inspect final answers for complete conditions. With evidence present but wrong answers, inspect generation. This is a design without performance data or guaranteed value from another model call.
Reranking adds processing, so record latency and failures. Unique-ID lookup may already be served by exact matching. Adopt it from concrete ordering errors rather than terminology alone.
Checked sources
These sources support the concepts and methods described here. Examples and test scope are labeled separately; check the version of the tools you use.