Asked about Splitting documents well
Someone asks you for the best chunk size. What do you say?
An answer that works
That it depends on how the documents are structured and has to be measured, and that it is usually not the biggest lever available. In a comparison across four splitters on two corpora written from the same facts, section-boundary chunking was the worst strategy on documents with headings and the best on the same content written as flowing prose, because a section means something different in each. Prepending the document title and heading path before embedding moved recall further than any choice of splitter.
Then they push further
How would you run that comparison on our corpus?
Collect twenty to fifty real questions with the passage that answers each one. Chunk the corpus three or four ways, index each, and report recall at k along with the number of characters a retrieval sends, because bigger chunks buy recall by sending more text and a recall table without a cost column hides that.
What gets marked up
Marked up for refusing to give a number, naming structure as the variable, and reporting cost alongside recall.
Reading an answer is not being able to give one. The section that teaches this is Splitting documents well, 4 hours of Chunking & document processing.
Learn this properly