 targeted improvements to the retrieval component.To wrap up, the retrieval evaluation process we've walked through - from manual spot-checking with carefully crafted queries to automated testing with synthetic question-document pairs - has provided a solid baseline understanding of our retrieval component's performance. The failure rates of 20% on our handpicked test cases and 16% on a larger sample of generated queries highlight clear room for improvement, but also validate that our semantic search is generally pointing in the right direction.

Going forward, we have a rich set of options to refine and upgrade our evaluation approach. Generating a more diverse array of test questions, leveraging semantic similarity metrics for a nuanced view beyond binary success/failure, performing comparative evaluations of different retrieval techniques, and conducting deep error analysis on failure cases - all of these avenues promise to yield valuable insights. As our RAG pipeline grows to handle more complex and wide-ranging queries, continued investment in comprehensive retrieval evaluation will be essential to ensure we're always surfacing the most relevant information.

Before we start working to improve or tweak our retrieval based on these evaluation results, let's shift gears and look at how we can evaluate the generation component of our RAG pipeline. Assessing the quality of the final answers produced by the system is equally crucial to gauging the effectiveness of our retrieval.