ChunkRank: Model-Aware Text Chunking and Abstention-Aware Answer Selection for LLM Pipelines

We participated in the Fifth UNLP shared task on multi-domain document understanding, where systems must answer Ukrainian multiple-choice questions from PDF collections and localize the supporting document and page. We propose a retrieval-augmented pipeline built around three ideas: contextual chunking of PDFs, question-aware dense retrieval and reranking conditioned on both the question and answer options, and constrained answer generation from a small set of reranked passages. Our final system uses Qwen3-Embedding-8B for retrieval, a fine-tuned Qwen3-Reranker-8B for passage ranking, and Qwen3-32B for answer selection. On a held-out split, reranking improves Recall@1 from 0.6957 to 0.7935, while using the top-2 reranked passages raises answer accuracy from 0.9348 to 0.9674. Our best leaderboard run reached 0.9452 on the public leaderboard and 0.9598 on the private leaderboard. Our results suggest that, under strict code-competition constraints, preserving document structure and making relevance estimation aware of the answer space are more effective than adding complex downstream heuristics.

Modern reasoning language models generate dense, sequential chain-of-thought traces implicitly assuming that every token contributes and that steps must be consumed in order. We challenge both assumptions through a systematic intervention pipeline--removal, masking, shuffling, and noise injection--applied to model-generated reasoning chains across three models and three benchmarks. Our findings are counterintuitive on three dimensions. Order: Does the sequential order of a reasoning chain matter for answer extraction? No--line-level shuffling reduces accuracy by less than 0.5 pp; word-level shuffling retains 62%-89% accuracy; only token-level shuffling collapses to near zero. Pretrained-only and instruction-tuned variants exhibit near-identical tolerance (78.67% vs. 78.00% under line shuffling), indicating order-independence originates from pretraining rather than reasoning-specific fine-tuning. Dense: Is all the information in a reasoning chain important for answer extraction? No--masking numeric digits collapses accuracy to exactly 0%, while masking alphabetic prose improves accuracy by 4.7 pp. Robustness: Is a reasoning chain that is both order-shuffling and non-dense still robust? Yes--the most aggressively reduced representation (all natural language removed, lines arbitrarily shuffled) still achieves 83% accuracy, and injecting false answers at 3x true-answer frequency leaves accuracy unchanged (83.3%->83.3%), falsifying a frequency-based extraction account. These results establish that answer extraction operates on a sparse, order-insensitive, and structurally robust informational substrate, opening paths toward parallelized and token-efficient reasoning generation.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems use the question-answering capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to access information outside their parameters. We evaluate if cluster-based semantic chunking improves retrieval and answer quality compared to fixed-size and recursive chunking evaluating on long, structured academic theses using the Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment (RAGAs) framework. RAGAs based faithfulness shows limited reliability in this setup. Performance on fixed versus document specific questions varied substantially, likely related to the formatting of documents and preprocessing. Under the tested configuration, cluster-based chunking did not outperform simpler strategies.