# ChunkNorris: A High-Performance and Low-Energy Approach to PDF Parsing and Chunking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00010 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00010/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 5 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [DocLayNet: A Large Human-Annotated Dataset for Document-Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01062/) (2022)
- [UniTable: Towards a Unified Framework for Table Recognition via Self-Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04822/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In Retrieval-Augmented Generation applications, the Information Retrieval part is central as it provides the contextual information that enables a Large Language Model to generate an appropriate and truthful response. High quality parsing and chunking are critical as efficient data segmentation directly impacts downstream tasks, i.e. Information Retrieval and answer generation. In this paper, we introduce ChunkNorris, a novel heuristic-based technique designed to optimise the parsing and chunking of PDF documents. Our approach does not rely on machine learning and employs a suite of simple yet effective heuristics to achieve high performance with minimal computational overhead. We demonstrate the efficiency of ChunkNorris through a comprehensive benchmark against existing parsing and chunking methods, evaluating criteria such as execution time, energy consumption, and retrieval accuracy. We propose an open-access dataset to produce our results. ChunkNorris outperforms baseline and more advanced techniques, offering a practical and efficient alternative for Information Retrieval tasks. Therefore, this research highlights the potential of heuristic-based methods for real-world, resource-constrained RAG use cases.