{
  "id": "query-rewriting",
  "code": "PTL-0131",
  "term": "Query Rewriting",
  "aliases": [
    "query expansion",
    "query reformulation",
    "rewrite-retrieve-read",
    "multi-query retrieval"
  ],
  "category": "retrieval-tools",
  "definition": "Query rewriting uses a language model to reformulate a user's question into one or more queries better suited to the retriever before retrieval is run.",
  "description": "User questions are often ambiguous, conversational, or phrased differently from the documents that answer them. Rewriting can resolve references to earlier turns, split a question into sub-queries, add keywords, or expand the query with a generated pseudo-document. It is closely related to HyDE, which embeds a hypothetical answer instead of the question.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "hypothetical-document-embeddings",
    "retrieval-augmented-generation",
    "agentic-rag"
  ],
  "introduced": 2023,
  "added": "2026-10-10",
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models",
      "authors": "Ma et al.",
      "year": 2023,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14283"
    },
    {
      "title": "Query2doc: Query Expansion with Large Language Models",
      "authors": "Wang et al.",
      "year": 2023,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07678"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/query-rewriting/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Query Rewriting. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0131). https://protologue.com/t/query-rewriting/"
}