# Evaluation of Chunking Strategies for Effective Text Embedding in Low-Resource Language on Agricultural Documents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22203 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22203/

## 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 16 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [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)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [Text Segmentation as a Supervised Learning Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09337/) (2018)
- [Late Chunking: Contextual Chunk Embeddings Using Long-Context Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04701/) (2024)
- [VnCoreNLP: A Vietnamese Natural Language Processing Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01331/) (2018)
- [Making a MIRACL: Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09984/) (2022)
- [Is Semantic Chunking Worth the Computational Cost?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13070/) (2024)
- [SEA-HELM: Southeast Asian Holistic Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14301/) (2025)
- [BHASA: A Holistic Southeast Asian Linguistic and Cultural Evaluation Suite for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06085/) (2023)
- [Reconstructing Context: Evaluating Advanced Chunking Strategies for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19754/) (2025)
- [Text Segmentation based on Semantic Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.05543/) (2015)
- [The Attribution Crisis in LLM Search Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00838/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this study, we compare the performance of four text chunking approaches: Recursive, Khmer-Aware, Sentence-Based, and LLM-Based within a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework applied to Khmer agricultural documents. The document chunks are encoded using the BGE-M3 multilingual embedding model and retrieved using the FAISS library. Performance is evaluated using four metrics: Average Retrieval Score (L2 distance), Answer Relevance, Khmer Coverage, and Khmer Intersection over Union, all measured against ground-truth question-answer pairs. For evaluation, we perform 5-fold cross-validation over 18 question-answer pairs. We observe the best performance for the character-based Recursive chunking method with a chunk size of 300 characters, achieving the lowest L2 distance (0.4295 +- 0.0461), highest Answer Relevance (0.8663 +- 0.0199), and highest Khmer IoU (0.6441 +- 0.0347). A paired t-test shows a statistically significant improvement over the Sentence-Based chunking method in L2 distance (p = 0.0121). These results highlight the importance of segmentation granularity and structural preservation for optimizing dense retrieval in morphologically complex, low-resource languages such as Khmer.