--- title: "Recall@k" summary: "Recall@k is the share of records for which the correct entity appears anywhere in the top k candidates returned by retrieval, and it is the ceiling on everything a matcher downstream can get right." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall-at-k last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # Recall@k > Recall@k is the share of records for which the correct entity appears anywhere in the top k candidates returned by retrieval, and it is the ceiling on everything a matcher downstream can get right. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall-at-k Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Measurement ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under measurement](https://entitybind.com/glossary#measurement). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What recall@k means Recall@k asks one question: was the right answer anywhere in the shortlist of length k. Not whether it was ranked first, and not whether the matcher subsequently chose it. Retrieval is scored separately from matching because it fails differently, and values at several k are usually reported together: recall@1 measures ranking, recall@50 measures whether the candidate generator is losing anything at all. The metric is a ceiling rather than a score. If recall@k is 0.90, then ten per cent of records cannot be resolved correctly no matter how good the scorer, the adjudicator or the research stage is, and any end-to-end accuracy figure is being computed on the ninety per cent that survived retrieval. The subtlety that makes recall@k dangerous to quote is that it is a property of the list, not of the winner. A high recall@5 says the answer is in there somewhere; it says nothing about whether the top row is right, and no row of a shortlist may be offered as a match on the strength of it. On the gated acquisition fixture, over 205 name-only records on the gated acquisition fixture. Entity Bind's correct entity was ranked first for 74% (151/205) and present in the top three for 100% (205/205). Recall is a property of the list, not of the winner. 74% is far below the 0.90 acceptance floor, so no row of that shortlist may be offered as a match, quoted as an accuracy number, or folded into an accepted-match count. The stub-adjudicated run behind the pairwise gate, not the 317-company live recording behind the tier table. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [How to measure entity resolution accuracy](https://entitybind.com/guides/how-to-measure-entity-resolution-accuracy): There is no single accuracy number for an entity resolution system, and any vendor quoting one is quoting a property of their fixture rather than of their engine. - [The accuracy method](https://entitybind.com/accuracy): Every published rate with the population it was measured over, its interval and its fixture — including the input shapes that fail. - [The API reference](https://entitybind.com/api): The REST surface: payloads, the decision outcomes, the error model, the usage block and the ceiling on the confidence field. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Candidate generation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/candidate-generation): Candidate generation is the retrieval step that proposes the small set of entities a record might be, and its recall is the hard ceiling on everything the rest of the pipeline can achieve. - [Blocking](https://entitybind.com/glossary/blocking): Blocking is the technique that makes entity resolution affordable by comparing each record only against a small set of plausible candidates instead of against every other record. - [Recall](https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall): Recall is the share of the true matches present in the data that a system actually found, and it is the metric that abstention costs you. - [Abstention](https://entitybind.com/glossary/abstention): An abstention is a first-class 'we do not know' returned instead of a match: the record comes back unresolved, with a ranked shortlist, a typed reason and the column that would have decided it. - [Confidence floor](https://entitybind.com/glossary/confidence-floor): A confidence floor is the score below which a system refuses to return a match at all, expressed as an acceptance contract rather than as a promise about accuracy. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [Blocking and candidate generation](https://entitybind.com/guides/blocking-and-candidate-generation) (Guide): You cannot compare every pair. How blocking keys work, why rarity weighting matters, how to measure retrieval with recall@k, and the silent failure mode that mints duplicates. ## The other 13 terms on this shelf How you tell whether any of it worked, and which numbers may not be quoted without which other numbers. - [Precision](https://entitybind.com/glossary/precision) - [Recall](https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall) - [F1 score](https://entitybind.com/glossary/f1) - [B-cubed (B³)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/b-cubed) - [Pairwise metrics](https://entitybind.com/glossary/pairwise-metrics) - [Cluster metrics](https://entitybind.com/glossary/cluster-metrics) - [Calibration](https://entitybind.com/glossary/calibration) - [Expected calibration error (ECE)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/expected-calibration-error) - [Wilson interval](https://entitybind.com/glossary/wilson-interval) - [False positive](https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-positive) - [False bind](https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-bind) - [Over-merge](https://entitybind.com/glossary/over-merge) - [Fragmentation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/fragmentation) Previous, alphabetically: [Recall](https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall) · Next, alphabetically: [Record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/record) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- The 0.90 confidence floor. It is an acceptance contract, not calibration evidence: it says what we refuse to return, not how often an accepted match is right. Read it with the coverage it costs. Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall-at-k, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.