Skip to content
Preptima
mediumConceptDesignMidSeniorStaff

How do you choose a chunking strategy for a document corpus?

4 min readUpdated 2026-08-15

Answer

Short answer

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.

Was this answer helpful?

Likely follow-ups

  • Your corpus mixes two-page policy notes and 400-page manuals. Do they get the same strategy?
  • How would you retrieve a small chunk but hand the model a larger window around it?
  • What would convince you to re-chunk a corpus you have already indexed?
  • Where does chunking stop helping and the question need structured data instead?

Related questions