ChunkNorris: A High-Performance and Low-Energy Approach to PDF Parsing and Chunking

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Hauptverfasser: Ciancone, Mathieu, Varangot-Reille, Clovis, Schaeffer, Marion
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ciancone, Mathieu
Varangot-Reille, Clovis
Schaeffer, Marion
author_facet Ciancone, Mathieu
Varangot-Reille, Clovis
Schaeffer, Marion
contents In Retrieval-Augmented Generation applications, the Information Retrieval part is central as it provides the contextual information that enables a Large Language Model to generate an appropriate and truthful response. High quality parsing and chunking are critical as efficient data segmentation directly impacts downstream tasks, i.e. Information Retrieval and answer generation. In this paper, we introduce ChunkNorris, a novel heuristic-based technique designed to optimise the parsing and chunking of PDF documents. Our approach does not rely on machine learning and employs a suite of simple yet effective heuristics to achieve high performance with minimal computational overhead. We demonstrate the efficiency of ChunkNorris through a comprehensive benchmark against existing parsing and chunking methods, evaluating criteria such as execution time, energy consumption, and retrieval accuracy. We propose an open-access dataset to produce our results. ChunkNorris outperforms baseline and more advanced techniques, offering a practical and efficient alternative for Information Retrieval tasks. Therefore, this research highlights the potential of heuristic-based methods for real-world, resource-constrained RAG use cases.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_00010
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ChunkNorris: A High-Performance and Low-Energy Approach to PDF Parsing and Chunking
Ciancone, Mathieu
Varangot-Reille, Clovis
Schaeffer, Marion
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
In Retrieval-Augmented Generation applications, the Information Retrieval part is central as it provides the contextual information that enables a Large Language Model to generate an appropriate and truthful response. High quality parsing and chunking are critical as efficient data segmentation directly impacts downstream tasks, i.e. Information Retrieval and answer generation. In this paper, we introduce ChunkNorris, a novel heuristic-based technique designed to optimise the parsing and chunking of PDF documents. Our approach does not rely on machine learning and employs a suite of simple yet effective heuristics to achieve high performance with minimal computational overhead. We demonstrate the efficiency of ChunkNorris through a comprehensive benchmark against existing parsing and chunking methods, evaluating criteria such as execution time, energy consumption, and retrieval accuracy. We propose an open-access dataset to produce our results. ChunkNorris outperforms baseline and more advanced techniques, offering a practical and efficient alternative for Information Retrieval tasks. Therefore, this research highlights the potential of heuristic-based methods for real-world, resource-constrained RAG use cases.
title ChunkNorris: A High-Performance and Low-Energy Approach to PDF Parsing and Chunking
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00010