Core concepts behind splitting and segmenting text
When working with large amounts of text, like long articles, books, or documents, we often need to break them down into smaller, more manageable pieces. This process is crucial for many applications, especially when feeding text into Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, which often have limits on how much text they can process at once.
Think of it like reading a very long book. Instead of trying to read it all in one go, you read it chapter by chapter, or even paragraph by paragraph. Text splitting does something similar for computers.
Key Goals:
Let’s define a few important terms:
Segmentation identifies the initial building blocks we’ll use to create our final chunks.
["Text", "splitting", "is", "useful."]
["Text splitting is useful.", "It helps AI process information."]
Example:
-> ["Text splitting is useful.\nIt helps AI process information.", "Another key concept is chunk overlap."]
Once the text is segmented into initial units (like sentences or paragraphs), the splitting process groups these units together to form the final chunks, trying to respect the Chunk Size
and Chunk Overlap
settings.
Let’s walk through a simple example using Sentence Segmentation and aiming for a Chunk Size
of around 15 words, with a Chunk Overlap
of 5 words.
Original Text: “Text splitting breaks down large documents. This makes them easier for AI to understand. AI models often have input limits. Therefore, chunking is essential for analysis. Proper splitting maintains context.”
1. Segmentation (by Sentence):
2. Chunking (Target Size: ~15 words):
Different situations call for different splitting strategies:
# Headers
, * Lists
, code blocks
, tables). It tries to keep these structural elements intact and often starts new chunks at major headers. It might segment by headers, then code blocks, then tables, then paragraphs, and finally sentences if needed to meet size constraints.# Top Level Header
would likely signal the start of a new chunk.Chunk Size
while minimizing awkward breaks.By understanding segmentation and splitting, you can better prepare your text data for analysis, search, or AI processing, ensuring that the meaning and structure of your original documents are respected as much as possible.
Core concepts behind splitting and segmenting text
When working with large amounts of text, like long articles, books, or documents, we often need to break them down into smaller, more manageable pieces. This process is crucial for many applications, especially when feeding text into Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, which often have limits on how much text they can process at once.
Think of it like reading a very long book. Instead of trying to read it all in one go, you read it chapter by chapter, or even paragraph by paragraph. Text splitting does something similar for computers.
Key Goals:
Let’s define a few important terms:
Segmentation identifies the initial building blocks we’ll use to create our final chunks.
["Text", "splitting", "is", "useful."]
["Text splitting is useful.", "It helps AI process information."]
Example:
-> ["Text splitting is useful.\nIt helps AI process information.", "Another key concept is chunk overlap."]
Once the text is segmented into initial units (like sentences or paragraphs), the splitting process groups these units together to form the final chunks, trying to respect the Chunk Size
and Chunk Overlap
settings.
Let’s walk through a simple example using Sentence Segmentation and aiming for a Chunk Size
of around 15 words, with a Chunk Overlap
of 5 words.
Original Text: “Text splitting breaks down large documents. This makes them easier for AI to understand. AI models often have input limits. Therefore, chunking is essential for analysis. Proper splitting maintains context.”
1. Segmentation (by Sentence):
2. Chunking (Target Size: ~15 words):
Different situations call for different splitting strategies:
# Headers
, * Lists
, code blocks
, tables). It tries to keep these structural elements intact and often starts new chunks at major headers. It might segment by headers, then code blocks, then tables, then paragraphs, and finally sentences if needed to meet size constraints.# Top Level Header
would likely signal the start of a new chunk.Chunk Size
while minimizing awkward breaks.By understanding segmentation and splitting, you can better prepare your text data for analysis, search, or AI processing, ensuring that the meaning and structure of your original documents are respected as much as possible.