Meta-Chunking: Learning Efficient Text Segmentation via Logical Perception

Jihao Zhao, Zhiyuan Ji, Pengnian Qi, Simin Niu, Bo Tang, Feiyu Xiong, Zhiyu li

Keywords: Text chunking, perplexity, margin sampling, large language models

TL;DR: This paper introduces the concept of Meta-Chunking, which utilizes large language models to perform more precise logical segmentation between sentences, enhancing the performance of retrieval-augmented generation.

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), while serving as a viable complement to large language models (LLMs), often overlooks the crucial aspect of text chunking within its pipeline, which impacts the quality of knowledge-intensive tasks. This paper introduces the concept of Meta-Chunking, which refers to a granularity between sentences and paragraphs, consisting of a collection of sentences within a paragraph that have deep linguistic logical connections. To implement Meta-Chunking, we designed Perplexity (PPL) Chunking, which balances performance and speed, and precisely identifies the boundaries of text chunks by analyzing the characteristics of context perplexity distribution. Additionally, considering the inherent complexity of different texts, we propose a strategy that combines PPL Chunking with dynamic merging to achieve a balance between fine-grained and coarse-grained text chunking. Experiments conducted on eleven datasets demonstrate that Meta-Chunking can more efficiently improve the performance of single-hop and multi-hop question answering based on RAG. For instance, on the 2WikiMultihopQA dataset, it outperforms similarity chunking by 1.32 while only consuming 45.8\% of the time. Furthermore, through the analysis of models of various scales and types, we observed that PPL Chunking exhibits notable flexibility and adaptability.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

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Submission Number: 4310