LLM-Based Chunking

~10 min read

Prompt an LLM to directly generate semantically isolated and meaningful chunks. Highest semantic accuracy of all five strategies, but also the most computationally demanding.

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Key points

  • Prompts an LLM directly to produce semantically isolated, meaningful chunks — no heuristics, actual understanding
  • Highest semantic accuracy of all 5 chunking strategies, since it goes beyond character counts, similarity, or structure
  • Most computationally demanding of the 5 — requires an LLM inference call per document rather than a cheap operation
  • LLMs' own limited context window means very large documents may need pre-splitting before this technique can even run
  • Typically reserved for high-stakes retrieval scenarios where the accuracy gain justifies the extra cost over semantic chunking