---
title: Retrieval, freshness, conflict, and grounding
seo_title: Retrieval, freshness, conflict, and grounding — video
description: 'Retrieving candidates is not enough: relevance and freshness must be weighed, conflicts resolved, and traceable evidence assembled.'
keywords: retrieval, RAG, context assembly, freshness, relevance, grounding, conflict resolution, hybrid search, context engineering
date: '2026-09-11T00:00:00+00:00'
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    <h1>Retrieval, freshness, conflict, and grounding</h1><p>Retrieving candidates is not enough: relevance and freshness must be weighed, conflicts resolved, and traceable evidence assembled.</p>
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    <div class="s5-video-watch__snippet-grid"><article><span>01</span><h2>1. Retrieval is not context assembly</h2><p>Let \(qt\) be a query derived from the current task. A system can generate candidates through several retrievers:</p></article>
<article><span>02</span><h2>2. Lexical, semantic, and structured retrieval solve different problems</h2><p>Semantic retrieval is useful when intent and vocabulary do not match literally. Lexical retrieval preserves signals an embedding may dilute: error codes, proper nouns, identifiers, exact…</p></article>
<article><span>03</span><h2>3. Fusing rankings does not fuse meaning</h2><p>Two retrievers may emit incompatible scores.</p></article></div>
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<li><a href="?t=12" data-s5-video-seek="12"><time>0:12</time><span>Resolve conflict before assembly</span></a></li>
<li><a href="?t=24" data-s5-video-seek="24"><time>0:24</time><span>Grounding keeps evidence and answer connected</span></a></li></ol></section>
  
  <aside class="s5-video-watch__source"><div><span class="s5-eyebrow">Context and evidence</span><h2>Continue with the full article</h2><p>The chapter develops the mechanism, primary sources, limitations and connections to the rest of the series.</p></div><a class="s5-video-watch__source-link" href="https://5sigmas.com/en/series/context-engineering-memory-mcp/04-retrieval-context-assembly-freshness-relevance-conflict-grounding/">Read the article →</a></aside>
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