Chunk Recomputation under Real Document Revisions: Measuring Update Cost and Retrieval Quality of Fixed, Recursive, and Content-Defined Chunking

We present the first large-scale, cross-domain evaluation of document chunking strategies for dense retrieval, addressing a critical but underexplored aspect of retrieval-augmented systems. In our study, 36 segmentation methods spanning fixed-size, semantic, structure-aware, hierarchical, adaptive, and LLM-assisted approaches are benchmarked across six diverse knowledge domains using five different embedding models. Retrieval performance is assessed using graded relevance scores from a state-of-the-art LLM evaluator, with Normalised DCG@5 as the primary metric (complemented by Hit@5 and MRR). Our experiments show that content-aware chunking significantly improves retrieval effectiveness over naive fixed-length splitting. The top-performing strategy, Paragraph Group Chunking, achieved the highest overall accuracy (mean nDCG@50.459) and substantially better top-rank hit rates (Precision@124%, Hit@559%). In contrast, simple fixed-size character chunking as baselines performed poorly (nDCG@5 < 0.244, Precision@12-3%). We observe pronounced domain-specific differences: dynamic token sizing is strongest in biology, physics and health, while paragraph grouping is strongest in legal and maths. Larger embedding models yield higher absolute scores but remain sensitive to suboptimal segmentation, indicating that better chunking and large embeddings provide complementary benefits. In addition to accuracy gains, we quantify the efficiency trade-offs of advanced chunking. Producing more, smaller chunks can increase index size and latency. Consequently, we identify methods (like dynamic chunking) that approach an optimal balance of effectiveness and efficiency. These findings establish chunking as a vital lever for improving retrieval performance and reliability.

Chunking is a fundamental preprocessing step in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), yet most existing chunkers rely primarily on heuristics. We introduce the Question--Evidence-Supervised Chunker (QESChunker), to our knowledge the first method for constructing static chunk indices from question--evidence supervision. QESChunker constructs document-specific chunk indices by optimizing over human-annotated or LLM-generated question--evidence pairs, without access to held-out test queries. We formulate non-overlapping and overlapping index construction through a unified question--evidence utility-maximization objective, turning chunking into a supervised combinatorial optimization problem. Under the non-overlap constraint, the objective decomposes over chunks and can be optimized exactly in polynomial time by dynamic programming. When overlap is allowed, the objective becomes monotone submodular; exact optimization is NP-hard, but our greedy achieves a $(1-1/\sqrt{e})$-approximation. Across two self-constructed and three public datasets, both variants outperform existing chunking methods in complete-evidence recall in nearly all evaluated settings, under the same overlap regime and a fixed hybrid retriever. These results recast chunking as supervised, budget-aware index construction for evidence retrieval.

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.