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The Financial Number Kept Its Unit

Deterministic search and bounded reads beat dense retrieval on one 780-page government report—but not classical BM25.

Published Updated Story ID: mp-2026-08-08-018
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Summary

Deterministic search and bounded reads beat dense retrieval on one 780-page government report—but not classical BM25.

READ answered 58.8 percent of 51 verified questions against 15.7 percent for dense retrieval and 35.3 percent for a tuned version. A top-k tool in the same loop reached 27.5 percent, while BM25 remained statistically indistinguishable from READ, narrowing the finding to embedding-based versus embedding-free retrieval.

Why it matters

Deterministic search and bounded reads beat dense retrieval on one 780-page government report—but not classical BM25.

Limits and context

No additional limitation was separately recorded.

Key claims

  1. Deterministic search and bounded reads beat dense retrieval on one 780-page government report—but not classical BM25.

    Evidence: source-2026-08-08-020

Sources

  1. arXiv preprint 2608.06305arXiv · primary research

Corrections

No corrections have been recorded for this story.

The Financial Number Kept Its Unit · The Machine Press