Three Sides of Retrieval: Factorial Evidence for Document-Side, Query-Side, and Answer-Side Complementarity in RAG
RAG systems rely on chunking, which destroys structural information in documents. Existing heading-based retrieval (Jeong et al., 2025) requires multiple LLM calls per document and returns sub-chunks within matched sections. We introduce ToC-guided page retrieval, which infers headings from visual formatting without LLM calls, embeds them as a parallel index, and loads full page sections. Across 1,280 conditions on 8 enterprise documents (5 to 195 pages), we find: (1) ToC is a significant main effect on answer quality (d = +0.41, p = 0.031), with the largest gains in completeness (+0.40) and usefulness (+0.40); (2) combined with answer-side verification, it outperforms query-side decompos...
| Authors | Ng S. T. Chong |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 19 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 June 2026 |
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