Breaking It Down: Domain-Aware Semantic Segmentation for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Allamraju, Aparajitha, Chitale, Maitreya Prafulla, Adibhatla, Hiranmai Sri, Mishra, Rahul, Shrivastava, Manish
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Allamraju, Aparajitha
Chitale, Maitreya Prafulla
Adibhatla, Hiranmai Sri
Mishra, Rahul
Shrivastava, Manish
author_facet Allamraju, Aparajitha
Chitale, Maitreya Prafulla
Adibhatla, Hiranmai Sri
Mishra, Rahul
Shrivastava, Manish
contents Document chunking is a crucial component of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), as it directly affects the retrieval of relevant and precise context. Conventional fixed-length and recursive splitters often produce arbitrary, incoherent segments that fail to preserve semantic structure. Although semantic chunking has gained traction, its influence on generation quality remains underexplored. This paper introduces two efficient semantic chunking methods, Projected Similarity Chunking (PSC) and Metric Fusion Chunking (MFC), trained on PubMed data using three different embedding models. We further present an evaluation framework that measures the effect of chunking on both retrieval and generation by augmenting PubMedQA with full-text PubMed Central articles. Our results show substantial retrieval improvements (24x with PSC) in MRR and higher Hits@k on PubMedQA. We provide a comprehensive analysis, including statistical significance and response-time comparisons with common chunking libraries. Despite being trained on a single domain, PSC and MFC also generalize well, achieving strong out-of-domain generation performance across multiple datasets. Overall, our findings confirm that our semantic chunkers, especially PSC, consistently deliver superior performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_00367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Breaking It Down: Domain-Aware Semantic Segmentation for Retrieval Augmented Generation
Allamraju, Aparajitha
Chitale, Maitreya Prafulla
Adibhatla, Hiranmai Sri
Mishra, Rahul
Shrivastava, Manish
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Document chunking is a crucial component of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), as it directly affects the retrieval of relevant and precise context. Conventional fixed-length and recursive splitters often produce arbitrary, incoherent segments that fail to preserve semantic structure. Although semantic chunking has gained traction, its influence on generation quality remains underexplored. This paper introduces two efficient semantic chunking methods, Projected Similarity Chunking (PSC) and Metric Fusion Chunking (MFC), trained on PubMed data using three different embedding models. We further present an evaluation framework that measures the effect of chunking on both retrieval and generation by augmenting PubMedQA with full-text PubMed Central articles. Our results show substantial retrieval improvements (24x with PSC) in MRR and higher Hits@k on PubMedQA. We provide a comprehensive analysis, including statistical significance and response-time comparisons with common chunking libraries. Despite being trained on a single domain, PSC and MFC also generalize well, achieving strong out-of-domain generation performance across multiple datasets. Overall, our findings confirm that our semantic chunkers, especially PSC, consistently deliver superior performance.
title Breaking It Down: Domain-Aware Semantic Segmentation for Retrieval Augmented Generation
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00367