Nemo Retriever MCP

From the author

Use when a task needs to search or add documents through NeMo Retriever MCP.

— the description by NVIDIA

AutoGineer summary

Written by AutoGineer from the skill’s own files, not by the author

The NeMo Retriever MCP skill provides a structured interface for interacting with the NeMo Retriever service via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It enables agents to perform semantic searches across indexed documents and ingest new content when necessary. The skill emphasizes using specific tool calls for querying and ingestion while ensuring that agents properly ground their responses in the retrieved evidence, including maintaining document identifiers for accurate citations.

What it does

Provides access to NeMo Retriever MCP tools for document retrieval and ingestion.
Supports querying existing document indices to find relevant information.
Facilitates the ingestion of new documents into the retriever system.
Guides the agent to ground answers using retrieved evidence hits.
Ensures document metadata and identifiers are preserved for citation purposes.

When to use it

When an agent needs to search through a collection of documents to answer a user query.
When new documents must be added to the retriever index for future searchability.
When the task requires evidence-based responses with specific source citations.
When working within an environment that supports NeMo Retriever MCP server tools.

Advantages

Standardizes the interaction pattern for document retrieval tasks.
Promotes accurate grounding by requiring evidence hits to be read and cited.
Prevents redundant ingestion of already searchable documents.
Provides clear error handling and retry guidance for query operations.

Usage examples

“Search for information regarding the company's Q3 policy in the retriever.”: The agent uses the query tool with a search string, retrieves the top 5 hits, and synthesizes an answer citing the specific document IDs and page numbers provided.
“Ingest the document at /shared/data/policy.pdf and then find the section on remote work.”: The agent calls ingest_documents for the specified path, confirms success, and then performs a query to extract the requested information about remote work.

Install

Download the skill as a ZIP:
https://autogineer.com/agent-skills/nvidia/nemo-retriever-mcp/download

Unzip it into the cross-client skills folder of your project:

mkdir -p .agents/skills && unzip nemo-retriever-mcp.zip -d .agents/skills

Documentation by NVIDIA

Use the NeMo Retriever MCP tools exposed under retriever instead of the retriever CLI.

The server exposes MCP tools, not MCP resources. Do not call list_mcp_resources to discover documents or decide whether Retriever is available; an empty MCP resource list is expected.

Workflow

Use query to search documents already available to Retriever.
Never ingest documents that are already searchable, including documents in a prebuilt index.
Use ingest_documents only when required documents are not yet searchable and server-readable paths are explicitly available. Do not assume that paths visible to the agent are also readable by the Retriever server.
After ingestion completes, use query to retrieve evidence from the added documents.
Start with top_k=5 and format="hits". Request more only when the first successful response does not contain enough evidence to answer the task.
Read evidence hits from the tool response and ground your answer in them.
Preserve available document identifiers such as document_id, source_id, or pdf_basename, along with page numbers, when the task requests citations or structured output.
If query fails, inspect the error and retry with corrected parameters or a shorter equivalent query. If it still fails, report the error before using another retrieval method.

Files

ATTRIBUTION.mdAdded by AutoGineer835 B
BENCHMARK.md7.5 KiB
LICENSELicence file added by AutoGineer11.2 KiB
SKILL.md1.5 KiB
evals/evals.json4.4 KiB
skill-card.md3.9 KiB
skill.oms.sig4.5 KiB

SKILL.md