Guide
Finding evidence
When you ask, ParsRAG searches only this conversation's documents, by meaning and by keyword, and picks the passages most likely to answer.
Two kinds of search
- Meaning: each passage has a 768-dimension vector from intfloat/multilingual-e5-base, stored in Qdrant with cosine distance.
- Keywords: a BM25 index (k1 1.2, b 0.75) over the same passages catches exact names, numbers and codes.
- The two rankings are merged with reciprocal rank fusion (k = 60).
- Every search is filtered to the conversation, and to the mentioned file when you use @.
How many passages
- Depth adapts to the question, between 8 and 30 passages: more for summaries, comparisons, lists and tables, fewer for short factual questions.
- With several files, broad questions spread retrieval across them so one large document can't crowd out the rest. Specific questions search all files together, so the file that holds the answer can provide most passages; every other file still contributes its best match, and passages repeated across files are kept once.
- You can fix the number yourself in Settings → Answers, from 1 to 50, or leave it empty so it is chosen per question.
Questions with several parts
- A question that asks several things, such as “which key opens Edit mode, and which fields did the example add?”, is also searched part by part. Each part keeps its best passages, and the model is asked to answer every part and say which one the documents don't cover.
- When part of a table is retrieved, the rest of the table comes with it, so questions about the largest or smallest value see every row.
Per mode
| Mode | Retrieval | Model knowledge | Extra step |
|---|---|---|---|
| Documents only (Strict) | Required | Excluded | Evidence gate before answering |
| Hybrid | Required and reranked | May supplement, marked as such | Arabic-script cross-encoder reranker |
| Open conversation | Skipped | Used directly | None |
The evidence gate
Documents only refuses only when three things are true: the best passage scores below the threshold (0.75 by default, adjustable in Settings → Answers), the question isn't about the whole document, and the passages don't contain enough of the question's distinctive words. With @ mentions, every mentioned file must have its own evidence.
The gate is an application safeguard, not a guarantee. Check important answers against their sources.