Graph RAG: Knowledge-Graph-Based Retrieval

~12 min read

Graph RAG converts retrieved content into a knowledge graph capturing entities and their relationships, giving the LLM structured relational context alongside raw text — well suited to questions that span multiple connected entities.

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Key points

  • Vector similarity is good at finding semantically-similar text, but weak at answering relationship-between-entities questions
  • Graph RAG converts retrieved content into a knowledge graph — entities as nodes, relationships as edges
  • Retrieval can then traverse graph structure (following relevant edges), not just match on semantic similarity
  • Well suited to naturally graph-shaped domains: org structures, supply chains, citation networks, biomedical relationships
  • Trade-off: requires an entity/relationship extraction step and graph infrastructure that plain vector RAG doesn't need — substantial overhead for simple fact-lookup use cases