Kazakh-E5-RAG-Embedding: Kazakh Embedding Model for RAG
Kazakh-E5-RAG-Embedding is an E5-style text embedding model for Kazakh RAG, semantic search, FAQ search, question-answer retrieval, and document search.
🏆 Best evaluated BASE-size embedding model on our Kazakh hard-negative retrieval benchmark.
The model is built on the multilingual-e5-base architecture and further optimized for Kazakh question-passage matching, hard-negative retrieval, and Kazakh Wikipedia-style document search.
Why use this model?
Kazakh-focused retrieval: optimized for Kazakh questions, passages, and document search
🔍 Hard-negative ranking: designed to distinguish correct passages from very similar incorrect passages
⚡ Efficient BASE-size model: 278M parameters
🧠 E5-style format: uses query: and passage: prefixes
🔧 RAG-ready: works with sentence-transformers, vector databases, and retrieval pipelines
📊 Evaluated on 3 Kazakh retrieval benchmarks
Usage
Installation
pip install sentence-transformers numpy
Convert Text to Embeddings
This model converts Kazakh text into 768-dimensional embedding vectors that can be used for semantic search, retrieval, and RAG.
python
1from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
23model = SentenceTransformer("shyngys879/kazakh-e5-rag-embedding")45text ="passage: Астана — Қазақстан Республикасының астанасы."67embedding = model.encode(text, normalize_embeddings=True)89print(embedding.shape)10# (768,)1112print(embedding[:5])13# Example output: [0.021, -0.034, 0.056, ...]
Basic Usage
python
1from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
2import numpy as np
34model = SentenceTransformer("shyngys879/kazakh-e5-rag-embedding")56query ="query: Қазақстанның астанасы қай қала?"7passage ="passage: Астана — Қазақстан Республикасының астанасы."89query_embedding = model.encode(query, normalize_embeddings=True)10passage_embedding = model.encode(passage, normalize_embeddings=True)1112# Since embeddings are normalized, dot product = cosine similarity13similarity = np.dot(query_embedding, passage_embedding)1415print(f"Similarity: {similarity:.4f}")
FAQ / Document Search
python
1from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
2import numpy as np
34model = SentenceTransformer("shyngys879/kazakh-e5-rag-embedding")56documents =[7"Астана — Қазақстан Республикасының астанасы.",8"Алматы — Қазақстанның ең үлкен қаласы.",9"Қазақстан — Орталық Азиядағы мемлекет.",10"Абай Құнанбайұлы — қазақтың ұлы ақыны және ағартушысы.",11]1213query ="Қазақстанның астанасы қай қала?"1415doc_embeddings = model.encode(16["passage: "+ doc for doc in documents],17 normalize_embeddings=True18)1920query_embedding = model.encode(21"query: "+ query,22 normalize_embeddings=True23)2425scores = np.dot(doc_embeddings, query_embedding)26best_idx = np.argmax(scores)2728print("Question:", query)29print("Best match:", documents[best_idx])30print("Score:",float(scores[best_idx]))
This same pattern can be used for FAQ search, document retrieval, and RAG pipelines: encode your documents, retrieve the most relevant passages, then pass them to an LLM as context.
Important Prefix Format
For best results, use E5-style prefixes:
Input type
Prefix
Query / question
query: ...
Passage / document
passage: ...
Benchmark Results
The model was evaluated on three Kazakh retrieval settings:
KazQAD-100 local — KazQAD-style retrieval with 100 candidates per query.
MRR means Mean Reciprocal Rank: higher is better, and it rewards models that rank the correct passage closer to the top.
OfficialKazQAD-HardTFIDF99
This benchmark uses 1,929 KazQAD test queries.
For each query, the model must rank the correct passage among 100 candidate passages.
The candidate set contains:
1 correct passage
99 TF-IDF hard negatives
A hard negative is an incorrect passage that is textually or topically similar to the query. This makes the task harder than retrieval with random negative passages, because the model must identify which similar passage actually answers the question.
Model
Hits@1
Hits@5
MRR
Params
Kazakh-E5-RAG-Embedding
35.98%
72.47%
0.5189
278M
KazEmbed-V5 original
30.07%
65.68%
0.4619
278M
multilingual-e5-large
30.17%
62.99%
0.4490
560M
multilingual-e5-base
25.87%
56.71%
0.4048
278M
paraphrase-multilingual-mpnet-base-v2
10.01%
29.91%
0.2082
278M
LaBSE
7.47%
26.75%
0.1821
471M
Additional Benchmarks
Benchmark
Model
Hits@1
Hits@5
MRR
Params
WikiFullCorpus
multilingual-e5-large
69.13%
85.79%
0.7656
560M
WikiFullCorpus
multilingual-e5-base
65.85%
80.87%
0.7290
278M
WikiFullCorpus
Kazakh-E5-RAG-Embedding
60.38%
74.32%
0.6689
278M
WikiFullCorpus
KazEmbed-V5 original
56.83%
70.49%
0.6276
278M
KazQAD-100 local
Kazakh-E5-RAG-Embedding
91.55%
100.00%
0.9554
278M
KazQAD-100 local
KazEmbed-V5 original
87.32%
100.00%
0.9334
278M
KazQAD-100 local
multilingual-e5-large
86.27%
98.24%
0.9189
560M
KazQAD-100 local
multilingual-e5-base
85.56%
97.54%
0.9105
278M
Benchmark notes:
WikiFullCorpus evaluates full-corpus retrieval over Kazakh Wikipedia-style passages. The model must find the correct passage from a larger document corpus, which makes this closer to practical semantic search and RAG.
KazQAD-100 local evaluates Kazakh question-passage retrieval with 100 candidates per query. It is a supporting benchmark for checking whether the model ranks the correct answer passage near the top.
Model Details
Field
Value
Model name
shyngys879/kazakh-e5-rag-embedding
Model type
Text embedding / bi-encoder retrieval model
Architecture family
multilingual-e5-base / XLM-RoBERTa
Continued fine-tuning from
Nurlykhan/kazembed-v5
Model lineage
intfloat/multilingual-e5-base → Nurlykhan/kazembed-v5 → this model
KazQAD-style retrieval data, TF-IDF hard negatives, Kazakh Wikipedia-style retrieval examples
Recommended Use Cases
Kazakh RAG systems
Kazakh semantic search
FAQ search
document retrieval
question-answer retrieval
educational search
Kazakh Wikipedia / encyclopedic search
multilingual projects involving Kazakh
Limitations
The model is optimized mainly for Kazakh retrieval and RAG.
On WikiFullCorpus, multilingual-e5-base and multilingual-e5-large perform better.
Citation
bibtex
1@misc{kazakh-e5-rag-embedding-2026,
2 title={Kazakh-E5-RAG-Embedding: A Kazakh Retrieval Embedding Model for RAG},
3 author={Shyngys Sovetkhan},
4 year={2026},
5 howpublished={Hugging Face Model Hub},
6 url={https://huggingface.co/shyngys879/kazakh-e5-rag-embedding}
7}
Acknowledgements
This model builds on:
Nurlykhan/kazembed-v5
intfloat/multilingual-e5-base
KazQAD / KazQAD-style retrieval data
Kazakh Wikipedia-style retrieval examples
Contact, Custom Fine-Tuning, and Model Use
For commercial deployment, RAG or semantic-search integration, model evaluation, or custom fine-tuning on your organization's documents and domain-specific data, please contact:
If your company or organization uses this model, has evaluated it, or has found it useful, I would greatly appreciate a brief official confirmation letter describing the use case or evaluation results. Such documentation helps demonstrate the model's real-world impact in my university applications. The letter can be sent to the email address above.