HiChunk: Evaluating and Enhancing Retrieval Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Chunking

摘要

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the response capabilities of language models by integrating external knowledge sources. However, document chunking as an important part of RAG system often lacks effective evaluation tools. This paper first analyzes why existing RAG evaluation benchmarks are inadequate for assessing document chunking quality, specifically due to evidence sparsity. Based on this conclusion, we propose HiCBench, which includes manually annotated multi-level document chunking points, synthesized evidence-dense question answer(QA) pairs, and their corresponding evidence sources. We also propose HiChunk, a hierarchical document structuring framework using fine-tuned LLMs and the Auto-Merge retrieval algorithm to enhance retrieval quality. Experiments demonstrate that HiCBench effectively evaluates the impact of different chunking methods across the entire RAG pipeline. Moreover, HiChunk achieves better chunking quality within reasonable time consumption, thereby enhancing the overall performance of RAG systems. Source code is available at https://github.com/TencentCloudADP/hichunk.