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FDE 101

Answer relevance

Answer relevance asks whether the response addresses the user’s question. It compares the answer with the question, not with the retrieved context or a reference answer.1

Tiny example

Section titled “Tiny example”
Question: What is the return window?
Answer:   The company was founded in 1998.

The answer could be true and supported by a retrieved company-history page. It is still irrelevant to the question.

Keep the axes separate

Section titled “Keep the axes separate”
  • Faithfulness compares answer claims with retrieved context.
  • Answer relevance compares the answer with the question.
  • Correctness compares the answer with trusted truth or a reference answer.
  • Retrieval relevance compares retrieved passages with the question.

FDE note

Section titled “FDE note”

Score these dimensions separately. One blended “quality score” makes it harder to decide whether to fix retrieval, context assembly, or generation.

Footnotes

Section titled “Footnotes”

  1. LangChain, “Evaluate a RAG application”. ↩