What is Context Window?
Turkish: Bağlam Penceresi (Context Window)
A context window is the total token capacity a language model can read and consider while generating one response in a single request.
What is Context Window?
A context window is the full amount of text the model can receive at once. The system instruction, user message, conversation history, retrieved documents, and generated answer all share this capacity.
This capacity is measured in tokens. A larger context window allows more documents or conversation history, but it does not automatically produce a better answer. Too much irrelevant content can make the model miss the important evidence.
How It Is Used
In RAG systems, the most relevant document passages are placed into the context window. That makes semantic search, chunking, and reranking quality important. If wrong or unnecessary sources fill the window, the model may struggle to answer correctly.
In chat applications, teams often summarize older messages, keep only important events, or use short-term memory instead of sending the full conversation every time.
Business Use
The context window affects cost, latency, and quality together. In legal document analysis, technical support assistants, or quote preparation, fitting the right sources into the available space becomes critical.
A large window should not mean dumping unplanned data into the prompt. Production systems need a clear policy for what enters the context, what stays out, and how sources are prioritized.
Related Terms
An LLM is a model trained on large text datasets that can understand and generate natural language, forming the basis of tools like ChatGPT.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)RAG is an AI architecture where a language model retrieves relevant passages from documents or databases before generating an answer.
Token (LLM)A token is a word, subword, character, or symbol unit that language models process, shaping context size, cost, and speed.