{
  "id": "hypothetical-document-embeddings",
  "code": "PTL-0056",
  "term": "Hypothetical Document Embeddings",
  "aliases": [
    "HyDE"
  ],
  "category": "retrieval-tools",
  "definition": "Hypothetical Document Embeddings (HyDE) improves retrieval by having a model write a hypothetical answer to the query, embedding that answer, and searching for real documents similar to it.",
  "description": "The generated document may contain errors, but its embedding tends to lie closer to relevant real documents than the short query does.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [
    "retrieval-augmented-generation"
  ],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [],
  "introduced": 2022,
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labels",
      "authors": "Gao et al.",
      "year": 2022,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10496"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/hypothetical-document-embeddings/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Hypothetical Document Embeddings. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0056). https://protologue.com/t/hypothetical-document-embeddings/"
}