Document Chunking

Document Chunking is a preprocessing technique that divides large documents into smaller, manageable segments or “chunks” for efficient processing by AI systems and retrieval applications. This process involves splitting text based on various strategies including fixed character counts, sentence boundaries, semantic coherence, or structural elements like paragraphs and sections. Effective chunking preserves contextual meaning while ensuring chunks fit within model token limits and maintain retrievability for vector databases. Key considerations include chunk size optimization, overlap strategies to prevent context loss, and maintaining semantic boundaries. Document chunking is critical for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, where properly sized chunks improve embedding quality and search relevance. Advanced chunking methods use natural language processing to identify topic boundaries and maintain coherent information units, significantly impacting downstream AI application performance in question-answering and content retrieval tasks.