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Stream/Area:
-
Subject:
-
Paper ID:
IJSREM68365
Volume:
10 |
10 |
Oct 2026
Pages:
1-5
Publication Frequency:
Monthly (12 issues per year)
License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.

Information Technology
Vidyalankar Institute of Technology

Information Technology
Vidyalankar Institute of Technology

Information Technology
Vidyalankar Institute of Technology

Information Technology
Vidyalankar Institute of Technology
RAG uses external knowledge through large lan-guage models, but how reliable this technique is depends on two key design aspects that are higher up in the system: chunking (or segmentation) and choosing the right chunks (retrieval).Using a fixed chunk size doesn’t take the structure of the document into account and can lose the meaning of the text.Also, dense-vector retrieval can’t match specific terms like identifiers, codes, and rare words accurately.In this paper, we introduce a new method that uses adaptive chunking—a technique that finds the boundaries between segments by measuring sentence similarity using a changing chunk size—and hybrid retrieval that uses Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) and/or BM25-cross-encoder re-trieval.We also explain the math behind the algorithm, discuss where this research fits in existing work, and describe how to test the model on question-answering benchmarks and RAG-related metrics like faithfulness, answer relevance, context recall, and precision.Studies have shown that using adaptive chunking and hybrid retrieval separately improves retrieval recall by 15–30% and answer precision by 20%.
KEYWORDS
In this part, we will look at two important techniques that may help improve the performance of RAG systems: one is adaptive chunking, which involves replacing simple chunking with a method that uses similarity to decide how to split text and adjust chunk size, as well as generating micro-headers. The other technique is the hybrid retrieval approach, which combines both sparse and dense models using RRF, and may also use neural re-ranking.The literature has plenty of examples of both techniques, and their limitations are often complementary.So, combining these might be one way to improve RAG systems in the future.
[1] G. Kamradt, 5 levels of text splitting,” 2024. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/FullStackRetrieval-com/RetrievalTutorials [2] T. Chen, H. Wu, S. Zhao, W. Zhang, Y. Duan, M. Wang, Y. Tian, and Z. Hao, “Dense X retrieval: What retrieval granularity should we use?” in Findings of EMNLP, 2023. [3] P. Sarthi, S. Abdullah, A. Tuli, S. Khanna, A. Goldie, and C. D. Man-ning, “RAPTOR: Recursive abstractive processing for tree-organized retrieval,” in International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024. [4] Anthropic, “Introducing contextual retrieval,” 2024. [Online].Available: https://www.anthropic.com/news/contextual-retrieval [5] “Optimizing chunking-method selection for RAG,” in Proceedings of LREC 2026, 2026. [6] “Comparative evaluation of advanced chunking for retrieval-augmented generation in large language models for clinical decision support,” PMC, 2025. [7] V. Karpukhin, B. Og˘uz, S. Min, P. Lewis, L. Wu, S. Edunov, D. Chen, and W. Yih, “Dense passage retrieval for open-domain question answer-ing,” in Proceedings of EMNLP, 2020. [8] S. Robertson and H. Zaragoza, “The probabilistic relevance framework: BM25 and beyond,” Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, vol. 3, no. 4, 2009. [9] G. V. Cormack, C. L. A. Clarke, and S. Bu¨ttcher, “Reciprocal rank fusion outperforms Condorcet and individual rank learning methods,” in Proceedings of SIGIR, 2009. [10] B. Strich et al., “From BM25 to corrective RAG: Benchmark-ing retrieval strategies for text-and-table documents,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.01733, 2026. [11] T. Formal, C. Lassance, B. Piwowarski, and S. Clinchant, “SPLADE: Sparse lexical and expansion model for first stage ranking,” in Proceed-ings of SIGIR, 2021. [12] O. Khattab and M. Zah
Publication Date
10/26/2026
Peer Review Type
Double-Blind Peer Review
Review Rounds: 2
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The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this research work.
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