Flat Retrieval by Chunking and Similarity Matching
documents
with structure + hierarchy
① chunk
uniform chunks
hierarchy thrown away ✂
② embed
semantic space · similar meaning = nearby points
★
★ query and its top-k nearest chunks
③ hand over
Reader (LLM)
reads k chunks, writes the answer
A single criterion
· is the chunk semantically close to the question
Simple and fast · still the most widely used baseline
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