AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is structure-aware chunking?
Structure-aware chunking: Chunking that follows a document's own structure, such as headings, list items, code blocks or table boundaries, so each chunk is a coherent section. It suits Markdown, HTML and manuals, where a heading gives strong context for the text beneath it.
Structure-aware chunking: an example
A Markdown manual is split at each second-level heading so 'Installation' and 'Troubleshooting' become separate chunks.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Synthetic test set
- Table extraction
- Text extraction
- Top-k retrieval
- Two-stage retrieval
- Vector database
- Vector index
- Vector normalisation
Where you learn it
Structure-aware chunking is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.