Lexical Retrieval

Lexical search finds documents containing the words asked for. It is unfashionable next to semantic retrieval and indispensable for a specific population: auditors, attorneys, compliance officers and anyone who needs to establish that a particular phrase, clause, code or identifier appears in a particular place. Semantic retrieval cannot make that guarantee — it returns what is similar, which is the wrong tool for proving presence or absence. Systems that abandon lexical search in favour of embeddings tend to rediscover this during their first regulatory request.

Centralpoint builds lexical and natural-language search alongside vector embeddings from one index, so the same corpus serves both the model and the person who needs exact-match precision. Maintaining a single index rather than two pipelines removes the possibility that what a model can retrieve and what an auditor can verify have drifted apart.