Hacker News Reader

Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

    grep -C $n word document

will get you $n lines of context on either side of the matching lines.

View on HN

Yeah - the idea is simple - but there are so many variations as to what makes a good chunk. If it is a program - then lines are good, but maybe you'd like to set the boundaries at block endings or something. And for regular text - then maybe sentences would be better than lines? Or paragraphs. And maybe it should not go beyond a boundary for a text section or chapter. And then there might also be tables. With tables - the good solution would be to fit some rows - but maybe the headers should also be copied together with the rows in the middle? But if a previous chunk with the headers was already loaded - then maybe not duplicate the headers?

Figures, too! Yeah you could write some logic essentially on top of a library like this, and tune based on optimizing for some notion of recall (grab more surrounding context) and precision (direct context around the word, e.g. only the paragraph or 5 surrounding table rows) for your specific application needs.

Using the models underlying a library like this, there's maybe room for fine-tuning as well if you have a set of documents with specific semantic boundaries that current approaches don't capture. (And you spend an hour drawing bounding boxes to make that happen).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com