The current text splitting approaches rely on heuristics (although one can use neural embedder to group semantically related sentences).
I propose a fully neural approach to semantic chunking.
I took the base distilbert model and trained it on a bookcorpus to split concatenated text paragraphs into original paragraphs. Basically it’s a token classification task. Model fine-tuning took day and a half on a 2x1080ti.
The library could be used as a text splitter module in a RAG system or for splitting transcripts for example.
The usage pattern that I see is the following: strip all the markup tags to produce pure text and feed this text into the model.
The problem is that although in theory this should improve overall RAG pipeline performance I didn’t manage to measure it properly. Other limitations: the model only supports English for now and the output text is downcased.
Please give it a try. I'll appreciate a feedback.
The Python library: https://github.com/mirth/chonky
The transformer model: https://huggingface.co/mirth/chonky_distilbert_base_uncased_...
We still want chunking in practice to avoid LLM confusion, undifferentiated embeddings, and handling large datasets at lower cost + large volumes. Large context means we can now tolerate multi-paragraph/page, so more like chunk by coherent section.
In theory we can do entire chapter/book, but those other concerns come in, so I only see more niche tools or talk-to-your-PDF do that.
At the same time, embedding is often a significant cost in above scenarios, so I'm curious about the semantic chunking overheads..