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Case study

When Semantic Search Misses Proper Nouns

Live semantic Q&A over portfolio content, Bedrock embeddings, Pinecone retrieval, Nova Pro generation, visitor uploads with citations.

AI WorkflowsPlatform Performance / Reliability

The challenge

The live portfolio RAG demo returned "no context" for Narrow Gate even though the phrase existed in an indexed upload. Dense-only Pinecone retrieval ranked portfolio architecture chunks above the story chunk, a classic hybrid-search gap for rare proper nouns.

Architecture approach

  • ·Reproduced the failure in production: vague entity queries vs rich contextual queries
  • ·Shipped interim fixes, reserved upload retrieval slots, corpus-busy query lock, session-scoped history
  • ·Planned Pinecone dense + sparse hybrid index (BM25 / pinecone-sparse-english-v0 + Titan v2)
  • ·Defined eval queries (Narrow Gate, Mara Voss clues, portfolio-only regression checks)
  • ·Structured logging (query.retrieval) for uploadHits and rewrite diagnostics

Tech stack

BedrockPineconeLambdaDynamoDBNext.js

Results

  • Narrow Gate query passes with upload-slot retrieval; full hybrid search documented as next step
  • Case study published alongside Live Portfolio RAG Demo on /work
  • Roadmap captured in portfolio-rag-api ROADMAP.md, not implemented yet by design