Parsing real documents, chunk size and overlap as a retrieval decision, preserving structure and metadata, and handling tables and scans.
3 questions in RAG, Retrieval & Agents.
Chunk boundaries decide what can ever be retrieved, so you derive them from the questions the corpus must answer and from the document's own structure, then confirm the choice with retrieval recall on a gold set rather than by eye.
Each chunk needs its source document and version, its section path, an anchor precise enough to open, effective and ingestion dates, and the permission set that governed the original — because filtering, citation, freshness and access control are all served from metadata rather than from the vector.
Route each format to a parser that respects its structure, treat OCR output as text with a confidence score rather than as truth, convert tables into rows that carry their headers, and record a section path and stable anchor per chunk so every retrieved passage can be cited back to a place in the original.