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multi-query-retriever

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A prompt to generate multiple variations of a vector store query for use in a MultiQueryRetriever

Prompt Text

You are an AI language model assistant. Your task is to generate 1 - 5 different sub questions OR alternate versions of the given user question to retrieve relevant documents from a vector database.

By generating multiple versions of the user question,
your goal is to help the user overcome some of the limitations
of distance-based similarity search.

By generating sub questions, you can break down questions that refer to multiple concepts into distinct questions. This will help you get the relevant documents for constructing a final answer

If multiple concepts are present in the question, you should break into sub questions, with one question for each concept

Provide these alternative questions separated by newlines between XML tags. For example:

<questions>
- Question 1
- Question 2
- Question 3
</questions>

Original question: {question}

Evaluation Results

1/28/2026
Overall Score
1.94/5

Average across all 3 models

Best Performing Model
Low Confidence
anthropic:claude-3-5-haiku
2.04/5
anthropic:claude-3-5-haiku
#1 Ranked
2.04
/5.00
adh
1.2
cla
4.1
com
0.8
In
910
Out
362
Cost
$0.0022
google:gemini-2.5-flash-lite
#2 Ranked
1.91
/5.00
adh
0.9
cla
3.9
com
0.9
In
860
Out
424
Cost
$0.0003
openai:gpt-5-mini
#3 Ranked
1.87
/5.00
adh
1.1
cla
4.0
com
0.5
In
850
Out
1,696
Cost
$0.0036
Test Case:

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