{"type":"post","id":"rcp-ndcg-10-a-new-approach-to-enterprise-1059c0","slug":"rcp-ndcg-10-a-new-approach-to-enterprise-1059c0","title":"RCP-nDCG@10: A New Approach to Enterprise Retrieval Quality","description":"Cohere’s thesis is that retrieval benchmarks can mis-score systems when their relevance labels omit useful documents.","retrieval_nugget":"Cohere’s thesis is that retrieval benchmarks can mis-score systems when their relevance labels omit useful documents.","published_at":"2026-09-30","updated_at":"2026-09-30","record_date":"2026-09-30","date_kind":"published_at","topics":[],"source_urls":["https://cohere.com/blog/rcp-ndcg"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:rcp-ndcg-10-a-new-approach-to-enterprise-1059c0","status":"published","visuals":[],"editorial_provenance":{"schema_version":"newruntime-editorial-copy-v1","content_status":"source_grounded_final","final_copy_sha256":"sha256:2af424ae68ee28bb26b3902833f62972bef21a5fed5f566be24954f97ccfd4b9","reviewed_at":"2026-09-30T16:03:10.640Z","source_evidence_count":1,"verified_claim_count":3,"site_analysis_schema_version":"newruntime-site-analysis-v1","site_object_kind":"field_note","observed_fact_count":3,"implication_count":1,"watch_condition_count":1,"related_record_count":0},"analysis":{"schema_version":"newruntime-site-analysis-v1","object_kind":"field_note","thesis":"Cohere’s thesis is that retrieval benchmarks can mis-score systems when their relevance labels omit useful documents.","observed_facts":[{"text":"Cohere describes RCP-nDCG@10 as using a calibrated AI judge to assess retrieved documents against an explicit relevance rubric.","source_urls":["https://cohere.com/blog/rcp-ndcg"]},{"text":"Cohere reports a blind human study with 46 annotators and 289 contests across 273 queries.","source_urls":["https://cohere.com/blog/rcp-ndcg"]},{"text":"Cohere reports RCP-nDCG selected the system reviewers preferred in 77% of contests, versus 52% for conventional nDCG.","source_urls":["https://cohere.com/blog/rcp-ndcg"]}],"mechanism":"The mechanism combines five yes/no rubric questions for each document with pairwise comparisons among documents; Cohere says the comparisons establish ordering while calibration puts relevance on a scale shared across queries.","why_now":"These reported results make the evaluation method—not a newly launched search product—the material change.","implications":["The first implication is that retrieval teams may need to test whether their offline benchmarks undercount relevant results beyond their existing qrels."],"evidence_boundary":"The evidence boundary is that these are Cohere-reported findings from its study, not independent replication; rubric design, judge calibration, task selection, and sampling may affect the result.","watch_conditions":["Watch for independent evaluations across other corpora and for reproducible details of the rubric and calibration procedure."],"related_records":[],"new_branch_reason":"No prior New Runtime record was supplied, so this is a distinct record for Cohere’s RCP-nDCG@10 method and its reported validation."},"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/rcp-ndcg-10-a-new-approach-to-enterprise-1059c0/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/rcp-ndcg-10-a-new-approach-to-enterprise-1059c0.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/rcp-ndcg-10-a-new-approach-to-enterprise-1059c0.json"},"next_reads":[{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/source-ledger.json","url":"https://newruntime.com/source-ledger.json","title":"Source Ledger","reason":"Inspect the public source evidence graph.","media_type":"application/json"}]}