The name ‘late chunking’ is indeed somewhat of a misnomer in the sense that the technique does not partition documents into document chunks. What it actually does is to pool token embeddings (of a large context) into say sentence embeddings. The result is that your document is now represented as a sequence of sentence embeddings, each of which is informed by the other sentences in the document.

Then, you want to parition the document into chunks. Late chunking pairs really well with semantic chunking because it can use late chunking's improved sentence embeddings to find semantically more cohesive chunks. In fact, you can cast this as a binary integer programming problem and find the ‘best’ chunks this way. See RAGLite [1] for an implementation of both techniques including the formulation of semantic chunking as an optimization problem.

Finally, you have a sequence of document chunks, each represented as a multi-vector sequence of sentence embeddings. You could choose to pool these sentence embeddings into a single embedding vector per chunk. Or, you could leave the multi-vector chunk embeddings as-is and apply a more advanced querying technique like ColBERT's MaxSim [2].

[1] https://github.com/superlinear-ai/raglite

[2] https://huggingface.co/blog/fsommers/document-similarity-col...

What does it mean to "pool" embeddings? The first article seems to assume the reader is familiar