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Module
Module 3 of 6Lesson 1 of 2~22 min

Choose a chunking strategy

When a document is split badly, the assistant sees only part of the right answer and the user gets incomplete information. The lesson covers the main families of chunking strategies, explains what a PM should contribute to that decision, and how to phrase it as requirements the team can test.

Lesson objective

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to choose a chunking strategy suited to your documents' structure and to the expected answer unit, and to phrase it as requirements the team can test.

Questions this lesson answers

  • How do you choose a chunking strategy for RAG?
  • What chunk size should you pick when indexing documents for RAG?
  • Why does fixed-length chunking cause problems in a RAG system?

Topics covered

  • chunking
  • document splitting
  • RAG chunking strategy
  • parent-child chunks

In the glossary

Full glossary

Where it fits

Chunk and index

How do documents become passages that retrieval can find?

Lessons in this module

  1. Choose a chunking strategy (this lesson)
  2. Understand embeddings and semantic search

What you will learn in this module

This lesson is part of the course Design a RAG architecture that fits your product

  • Specify the source inventory, exclusions, the metadata to capture and the document chunking strategy.
  • Design retrieval: semantic, keyword or hybrid search, reranking, contextual retrieval, number of passages and relevance threshold.