How to Build an Over-Engineered Retrieval System

Building an intelligent retrieval system requires moving beyond basic chunking and semantic search, as there is no standard blueprint for advanced implementations. This guide details an "over-engineered" approach to demonstrate techniques like custom chunkers, query rewriting, and context expansion. The author uses a custom-built system with 150 ArXiv papers to show how to process different document types, such as tabular data and PDFs. This process involves creating structured chunks with metadata, keys for connecting information, and document-level summaries to improve retrieval quality for a large language model.