Cross-Document Topic-Aligned Chunking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05265v1
• Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2025 11:45:45 GMT
• Title: Cross-Document Topic-Aligned Chunking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Authors: Mile Stankovic,
• Abstract summary: Cross-Document Topic-Aligned chunking reconstructs knowledge at the corpus level.<n>It first identifies topics across documents, maps segments to each topic, and synthesizes them into unified chunks.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Chunking quality determines RAG system performance. Current methods partition documents individually, but complex queries need information scattered across multiple sources: the knowledge fragmentation problem. We introduce Cross-Document Topic-Aligned (CDTA) chunking, which reconstructs knowledge at the corpus level. It first identifies topics across documents, maps segments to each topic, and synthesizes them into unified chunks. On HotpotQA multi-hop reasoning, our method reached 0.93 faithfulness versus 0.83 for contextual retrieval and 0.78 for semantic chunking, a 12% improvement over current industry best practice (p < 0.05). On UAE Legal texts, it reached 0.94 faithfulness with 0.93 citation accuracy. At k = 3, it maintains 0.91 faithfulness while semantic methods drop to 0.68, with a single CDTA chunk containing information requiring multiple traditional fragments. Indexing costs are higher, but synthesis produces information-dense chunks that reduce query-time retrieval needs. For high-query-volume applications with distributed knowledge, cross-document synthesis improves measurably over within-document optimization.

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