Glossary

Glossary

The terms the other pages use, in plain words.

• Answer contract: what the server tells the client's model to do with an answer: use only the returned passages, treat their text as data rather than instructions, cite them, copy facts verbatim, check the draft, say which sentences were not checked, and show the receipt. See Answers you can prove.
• Clause path: where a passage sits in its document, such as 7 Termination > 7.2 Notice, taken from its headings and numbered clauses. It is part of each citation.
• Archived: a citation label, "archived": true, on a passage whose file matches one of its layer's archived patterns (.gitignore style, set with strata_set_archived_patterns or the preset key archived_patterns). See Archived files.
• Chunk: a passage of a document, cut along its headings or structure. Search returns chunks, each with its file and section.
• Confidence: high, medium or low, returned with every strata_search result and with a detailed strata_ask response (the concise answer gives status instead); a low one comes with a warning. It is judged on the reranker's relevance probability (0 to 1) or, with reranking off, on the question/passage similarity; the result names the basis.
• Cut: "cut": true on a clause that came back only in part because the whole did not fit the token budget; strata_ask also says so in its note. See When part of the answer is missing.
• Document date: the date in a citation, from the document's front matter (date_source: "front_matter") or else the file's modification time ("file"). See Document dates.
• Embedding: a list of numbers that stands for a chunk's meaning, so similar meanings get similar numbers. The embedding model (all-mpnet-base-v2 by default) makes them; the vector column stores them (EMBEDDING_DIMENSIONS, 768 by default).
• Extractive answer: an answer made of the document's own sentences, chosen by the server without a language model. See Extractive answers.
• Grounded answer: an answer your client writes from the cited passages and checks with strata_verify. See Checking a drafted answer.
• HNSW: the pgvector index that finds similar embeddings quickly; HNSW_EF_SEARCH trades recall for speed.
• Hybrid search: a search by meaning (embeddings) and a search by words (PostgreSQL full-text search), merged into one list with RRF.
• interaction_id: the id on each search and ask result while learning is on; pass it to strata_feedback to rate the result.
• Layer: a named collection of documents, usually one folder or one domain, with its own chunking and routing rules.
• nothing_checked: the strata_verify result for a draft with citations but no quotes and no facts to check; it gets no receipt, because nothing shows the answer is right.
• Passage: one cited piece of a strata_ask answer, S1, S2, …, with its exact text and its citation.
• Query rewriting: optional; a language model turns a question into several searches in the layer's own terms. Learned rewrites are reused without the model.
• Receipt: a stored record of the quotes behind an answer (rcpt_…), opened with strata_get_receipt, the strata://receipts/{receipt_id} resource or stratakb receipt <id> outside the chat; it shows each quote in its document, marked current, changed (with the newer version) or gone (its file or layer was removed). strata_verify issues them for a verified draft, and extractive answers carry one too. They are kept for RECEIPT_RETENTION_DAYS (90 by default).
• Replaced by: replaced_by in a citation, naming the file that says in its front matter (supersedes) that it replaces this one (the first by path when several do). See What a document says it replaces.
• Reranking: in strata_ask, a second model (a cross-encoder, RERANKING_MODEL) reads the question with each candidate chunk and puts the best first.
• Routing patterns: a layer's regular expressions. When a question names no layers, those whose patterns match its first 2,000 characters are searched first. A pattern that does not compile or that repeats a repeated part (such as (\w+\s?)*) is refused when the layer is created or updated or the preset is loaded, and skipped if a layer already holds one.
• RRF (Reciprocal Rank Fusion): how hybrid search merges its two lists by rank, weighted by HYBRID_SEMANTIC_WEIGHT and HYBRID_KEYWORD_WEIGHT, with the constant HYBRID_RRF_K.
• Token budget: how much passage text strata_ask returns, about 1,500 tokens by default (ANSWER_TOKEN_BUDGET).
• top_k: how many chunks a search returns: 5 by default for strata_search, 10 per search for strata_ask, whose answer is then cut to the token budget.