Query Rewriting

Reformulate the user's latest utterance into a standalone retrieval query so ambiguous follow-ups resolve against the knowledge store correctly.

Conversational queries are often underspecified ("How about Emily Doe?" after a question about John Doe). RAG retrieval needs a rewritten standalone query that incorporates dialogue state.

AI systems typically prompt a rewriter with recent turns: produce what the user is actually asking. Rewriting may need identity resolution or external lookup ("his wife"); if that fact is unavailable, the rewriter should mark the query unsolvable rather than invent a name. Treat the search string itself like a mini-prompt — clarifying intent and background ("book to read next", "young backpacker") steers which snippets rank high. Rewritten queries feed the retriever before hybrid retrieval or embedding search, and sit in short-term agent memory with the conversation.

---

Sources

• AI Engineering (Chip Huyen), ch. 6
• Prompt Engineering for LLMs (Berryman), ch. 5