Query Machine Learning
noun
Definition 1: A formalized expression of a user’s information need in an information retrieval system [Machine Learning Glossary].
Example in context: “In the most fundamental sense, DPR achieves its namesake function—it retrieves, locating and returning relevant context to the user given a query.” [Reichman et al. 2024]
Definition 2: A query vector in vector-space or transformer-based models, used in query–key matching within the attention mechanism [Vaswani et al. 2017].
Example in context: “By comparing the performance of standard attention mechanisms with a simplified version that excludes queries and keys, relying solely on positions, we achieve competitive results while reducing computational cost and parameter usage.” [Sclocchi et al. 2024]
Synonym: request (IR context)
Related terms: search query, query vector, key, value, attention, information retrieval