A text chunk is a smaller document segment created by a text splitter for retrieval and indexing. Chunking controls retrieval granularity: smaller chunks improve precision but can lose context, while larger chunks preserve context but add noise. section 12.2.4 section 12.1.3
A production chunking configuration should make these choices explicit:
- Validate chunk quality through retrieval results because chunking interacts with embedding quality, similarity metrics, retrieved-document count, and similarity thresholds. section 12.2.4
Markdown chunks for a FAISS retrieval pipeline
Load Markdown files recursively, split them with a RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter using a 1,000-character size, 200-character overlap, and heading-first separators, then pass the chunks to FAISS.from_documents for vector indexing. A test query can retrieve the three nearest chunks for inspection.
