@inproceedings{wenxuan-etal-2026-freechunker,
    title = "{F}ree{C}hunker: A Cross-Granularity Chunking Framework",
    author = "Wenxuan, Zhang  and
      Jiang, Yuan-Hao  and
      Cao, Yang  and
      Wu, Yonghe",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.findings-acl.730/",
    pages = "14853--14865",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Chunking strategies significantly impact the effectiveness of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Existing methods operate within fixed-granularity paradigms that rely on static boundary identification, limiting their adaptability to diverse query requirements. This paper presents FreeChunker, a Cross-Granularity Encoding Framework that fundamentally transforms the traditional chunking paradigm: the framework treats sentences as atomic units and shifts from static chunk segmentation to flexible retrieval supporting arbitrary sentence combinations. This paradigm shift not only significantly avoids the computational overhead required for semantic boundary detection, but also enhances adaptability to complex queries. Experimental evaluation on LongBench V2 demonstrates that FreeChunker possesses significant advantages in both retrieval performance and time efficiency compared to existing chunking methods. The pre-trained models and codes are available at https://github.com/mazehart/FreeChunker."
}