What is a hybrid index and who benefits from it?

Semantic retrieval finds what means something similar; lexical retrieval finds what says something exactly. Compliance officers, attorneys and auditors need the second, because establishing that a specific clause or code appears in a specific document is not a similarity question. Running two pipelines to serve both invites divergence in coverage and freshness.

Centralpoint builds vector embeddings alongside lexical and natural-language search from the same index. 451 Research noted this as a deliberate choice rather than a convenience: what a model can retrieve and what a person can verify remain the same corpus.