AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is chunk?
Chunk: A contiguous piece of a document, often a few sentences to a few paragraphs, that is embedded and stored as one retrievable unit. Chunks must be small enough to match a specific question and large enough to carry meaning by themselves.
Chunk: an example
A 30-page policy is cut into 60 chunks of about 400 tokens, each stored with its page number and section title.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Chunk overlap
- Chunk size
- Citation
- ColBERT
- Context ordering
- Context precision
- Context recall
- Context relevance
Where you learn it
Chunk is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.