Document Chunking

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Overview

Document chunking studies how to divide long or complex documents into units that models can retrieve, understand, and process without losing important context. Common approaches include fixed-token or recursive splitting, semantic boundaries, and structure-aware methods that preserve sections, tables, or document hierarchies; newer methods adapt boundaries to likely queries. Evaluations commonly measure retrieval and question-answering quality alongside index size, latency, and token use, and show that parsing and embedding choices interact with chunking. There is no universally best strategy: preserving structure and cross-section evidence can improve results, but may increase cost, while benefits vary by domain, document layout, and task.

Latest papers

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53 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, down 50% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. QESChunker: A Single Objective Unifies Overlapping and Non-Overlapping Chunking for RAG

    Oct 27, 2026Yifan Zhao, Qianyang Zhao, Xinyu Guan +2Document ChunkingRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    Alibaba Group (alibaba-inc.com) · Taobao (China) Software Co., Ltd. (taobao.com)

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

    Oct 22, 2026Yuning Bian, Lele Xu, Yifan Yuan +2Document ChunkingRAG Evaluation

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University of Technology, Ma’anshan, China

  3. StrucChunk: Structure-Aware Retrieval for Legal Document RAG

    Oct 19, 2026Surya Deep Singh, Ashutosh Tripathi, Gaurav Deep SinghLegal IRDocument Chunking

    Independent Researcher.

  4. Does Document Structure Help Dense Retrieval? A Placebo-Controlled Ablation of Four Mechanisms Across Two Corpora

    Oct 7, 2026Andrey Kuehlkamp, Priscila Correa Saboia Moreira, Samuel RundInformation RetrievalDense Retrieval

    Center for Research Computing, University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

  5. Smart Content Ingestion for Generative AI Workloads

    Oct 5, 2026Abbas Raza Ali, Muhammad Ajmal Siddiqui, Moona ZahidDocument ChunkingDocument Information Extraction

    Citigroup Inc., London, United Kingdom · Ernst & Young LLP, London, United Kingdom · NVIDIA Corporation, London, United Kingdom

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

    Sep 24, 2026Amit Nautiyal, Ayush Bhatt, Gaurav NautiyalDocument ChunkingQuestion Answering

  7. Document Retrieval-Aware Chunking (D-RAC): Universal Retrieval-Aware Ingestion of Enterprise Documents via PDF Normalization and Multimodal Markdown Conversion

    Sep 21, 2026Uday Allu, Abhivanth Sivaprakash, Pratik Singh +1Document ChunkingRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    AI Research Team Yellow.ai

  8. Splitting Documents at Lower Cost: Multi-Split Boundary Decisions for LLM-Based Page Stream Segmentation

    Sep 18, 2026Nikhil Reddy Pottanigari, Sepideh Kharaghani, Saverio Vadacchino +2Document ChunkingLLM Inference Efficiency

    ServiceNow Canada

  9. Q&A on Any Spreadsheet Requires Interpreting Its Grid Structure

    Sep 17, 2026Zofia SmoleńDocument ChunkingTable QA

    Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw, Poland

  10. Parser, Chunking, and Embedding Interactions in Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Indian Government Regulatory Documents

    Sep 15, 2026Shubham Kumar SinghRAG EvaluationIR Evaluation

  11. Doc2FRC: Length-Consistent Document-Level Machine Translation via Fixed-Range Chunking

    Sep 11, 2026Xiaotian Wang, Youyuan Lin, Zhan Shen +1Document ChunkingLLM Fine-Tuning

    The University of Tokyo · Riken · Kyoto University +1

  12. EAR: Entity-Aware Partitioning Approach for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Development

    Sep 10, 2026Cenab Batu Bora, Oylum Alatlı, Sebnem Bora +1Document ChunkingRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA · Ege University, Izmir, Turkey

  13. Configurable Semantic Chunking for Biomedical Information Extraction in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

    Aug 31, 2026Riya Ahuja, Tim Kacprowski, Roya Shiasi SardoabiRelation ExtractionDocument Chunking

    Institute of Data Science in Biomedicine, TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany · Braunschweig Integrated Centre of Systems Biology, TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

  14. When Tokenizers Fail: Byte-Level Chunking for Zero-Shot Transfer to Low-Resource Languages

    Aug 27, 2026Sanjeev Kumar, Atsuki Yamaguchi, Nikolaos AletrasByte-Level Language ModelLow-Resource Language Processing

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay, India · School of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

  15. Comparing Chunking and Embedding Strategies for Turkish RAG Systems

    Aug 24, 2026Mustafa Sertaç Türkel, Fatma Nur Korkmaz, Ahmet Tuğrul BayrakRetrieval-Augmented GenerationRAG Evaluation

    Data Science and Innovation Ata Technology Platforms Istanbul, Turkey

  16. Right Reset: Chunking by Prefix Removal

    Aug 5, 2026Mike VegetoDocument ChunkingCausal Interventions in Language Models

    Independent Researcher

  17. Khondo: A Multimodal Benchmark for Document Packet Splitting of Bangla Forms

    Jul 23, 2026Abu Tyeb Azad, Fahim Ahmed, Ishita Sur Apan +7Document ChunkingMultilingual VLM Evaluation

    Wichita State University, USA · CCDS, Independent University, Bangladesh · Amazon GenAI, USA

  18. Evaluating Chunking Strategies for Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Academic Texts

    Jul 2, 2026Valentin J. J. Kreileder, Johannes Reisinger, Andreas FischerDocument ChunkingRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    Computer Science · Deggendorf Institute of Technology · Deggendorf, Germany

  19. When Does Overlap Help? OSU-Mem and a Cell-Conditional Analysis of Trajectory Memory for LLM Agents

    Jun 19, 2026Mellow Baixuan Chen, Xiangguo SunDocument ChunkingLLM Agent Memory

    Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, USA · Southeast University, Nanjing, China

  20. Lost in a Single Vector: Improving Long-Document Retrieval with Chunk Evidence Aggregation

    Jun 17, 2026Shanshan Lyu, Yiwei Wang, Yujun Cai +2Long-Context RetrievalDocument Chunking

    Chongqing University · State Key Laboratory of AI Safety · Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences +2

  21. SproutRAG: Attention-Guided Tree Search with Progressive Embeddings for Long-Document RAG

    Jun 16, 2026Amirhossein Abaskohi, Issam H. Laradji, Peter West +1Document ChunkingRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    University of British Columbia · ServiceNow Research

  22. SCAR: Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval for Efficient Context Expansion in RAG

    Jun 15, 2026Nathanaël LangloisDocument ChunkingRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    Horizon Flow

  23. Self-Conditioned Positional HNSW for Overlap-Aware Retrieval in Chunked-Document RAG Systems: Method and Industrial Evidence-Quality Audit

    Jun 1, 2026Nataraj Agaram Sundar, Tejas MorabiaDocument ChunkingRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    eBay Inc., San Jose, CA, USA

  24. Efficient RAG with Intent-Aware Retrieval and Semantics-Preserving Chunking

    May 31, 2026Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari, Chaoning Zhang, Jiaquan Zhang +6Multi-Hop QADocument Chunking

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University · Nota AI

  25. Chunking Methods on Retrieval-Augmented Generation - Effectiveness Evaluation Against Computational Cost and Limitations

    May 30, 2026Mateusz Śmigielski, Michał Rajkowski, Mateusz Zbrocki +5Document ChunkingRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    Department of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Wrocław 50-370, Poland

  26. Adaptive Targeted Dynamic Chunking for Tokenization-Free Hierarchical Model

    May 28, 2026Thang Dang, Akira Nakagawa, Kenichi Kobayashi +1Document ChunkingByte-Level Language Model

    Fujitsu Research of America · Pittsburgh, PA, USA · Fujitsu Limited +1

  27. LitSeg: Narrative-Aware Document Segmentation for Literary RAG

    May 26, 2026Ruikang Zhang, Zhanni Chen, Yiqiao Cai +1Document ChunkingRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    Peking University, Beijing, China

  28. SEEK: Semantic Evidence Extraction via Adaptive ChunKing for Multilingual Fact-Checking

    May 26, 2026Gaurav Kumar, Babu Kumar, Ayush Garg +2Document ChunkingAutomated Fact-Checking

    Department of Data Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India

  29. Evaluation of Chunking Strategies for Effective Text Embedding in Low-Resource Language on Agricultural Documents

    May 21, 2026Sovandara Chhoun, Pichdara Po, Sereiwathna Ros +2Document ChunkingMultilingual IR

    Department of Big Data, Chungbuk National University, Cheongju-si, South Korea · Department of Computer Science, Chungbuk National University, Cheongju-si, South Korea · BigDataLabs Co., Ltd. Department of Management Information Systems, Chungbuk National University, South Korea

  30. Chunking German Legal Code

    May 19, 2026Max Prior, Natalia Milanova, Andreas SchultzDocument ChunkingRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    Technical University of Munich, Boltzmannstraße 3, 85748 Garching near Munich