Course Objective & Scope
The single most common cause of poor RAG quality is not the LLM or vector database, but mangled PDF tables, split clauses and context-stripped chunks created during ingestion. This course covers layout-aware extraction from messy enterprise formats (multi-column PDFs, scanned files, spreadsheets, HTML, Confluence/SharePoint) and advanced chunking architectures.
Participants test Docling, Marker/Unstructured and VLM-based parsers on challenging documents from their own organisation, building an ingestion pipeline with structural, parent-child and contextual chunking.
Who Should Attend?
- Data and AI engineers building ingestion pipelines for RAG and enterprise knowledge bases
- Software developers processing complex regulations, contracts, technical manuals and financial reports
- Data scientists improving retrieval accuracy through better data preparation
- Prerequisite: Python data processing experience and basic familiarity with RAG
Key Takeaways
- Select the right parser for multi-column PDFs, complex tables and scanned documents
- Index tables and figures without losing structure by combining Markdown/JSON with natural-language summaries
- Apply heading-aware, parent-child or contextual chunking matched to document structure
- Strip header/footer noise, deduplicate content and enrich chunks with hierarchical metadata
- Design incremental ingestion pipelines that update and purge stale chunks via content hashes
Curriculum
Document Parsing and Layout Analysis
- Why naive PDF readers fail: reading order, multi-column layouts and footnotes
- Comparing Docling, Unstructured, Surya/Marker and VLM-based document parsers
Indexing Tables, Lists and Visual Elements
- Preserving table integrity: HTML/Markdown representations, header propagation and summary embeddings
- Indexing diagrams, charts and embedded figures via VLM captions
Chunking Strategies: Fixed, Structural and Semantic
- Token-based, recursive and Markdown/HTML heading-hierarchy chunking
- Embedding-breakpoint semantic chunking and when it actually helps
Preserving Context: Parent-Child, Late Chunking and Contextual Retrieval
- Small-to-big retrieval: matching on fine chunks while passing parent sections to the LLM
- Contextual Retrieval (prepending document-level context per chunk) and late chunking
Cleaning, Deduplication and Incremental Ingestion Pipelines
- Boilerplate header/footer removal, near-duplicate detection (MinHash/SimHash) and PII scrubbing
- Content-hash tracking for incremental updates and orphan chunk cleanup
Lab: Ingestion Pipeline on Complex Corporate Documents
- Hands-on parsing and chunking experiments on internal PDFs and tables
- Measuring how chunking choices impact downstream retrieval recall
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