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Long-Form Document Processing Strategies

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About This MicroSim

This interactive decision tree guides students through choosing the right strategy for processing documents that exceed a model's context window. By answering 2-3 questions about their goal (summarize, extract, analyze, or Q&A), document size, and required detail level, students arrive at a recommended strategy with step-by-step instructions and pro tips.

Strategies covered include direct summarization, hierarchical summarization, map-reduce, chunking with overlap, targeted extraction, and more.

How to Use

  1. Read the question displayed at the top of the decision tree
  2. Click an answer to proceed to the next decision point or a strategy recommendation
  3. Review the recommendation including its description, numbered steps, and pro tip
  4. Click "Start Over" to try a different path and compare strategies
  5. Click "Back" to revisit a previous decision

Lesson Plan

Grade Level

High School through Adult Learners

Duration

10-15 minutes

Prerequisites

Basic understanding of context windows and token limits in language models.

Activities

  1. Exploration (5 min): Navigate through all four starting paths (summarize, extract, analyze, Q&A) and note the different strategies recommended.
  2. Guided Practice (5 min): Given a scenario (e.g., "You have a 200-page legal contract and need to find all liability clauses"), use the decision tree to find the best strategy. Discuss why that strategy fits.
  3. Discussion (5 min): Compare map-reduce vs. hierarchical summarization. When would you choose one over the other?

Assessment

  • Students can identify the appropriate processing strategy for a given document size and task
  • Students can explain why chunking strategies differ based on the goal
  • Students can describe the tradeoffs between processing speed and detail retention

References

  1. Wikipedia: MapReduce - The distributed processing paradigm that inspires map-reduce summarization
  2. LangChain Document Processing - Practical implementations of chunking strategies