What is Document Intelligence?
RAG & RetrievalExtracting structure from documents before they enter the index: tables keep their headers, clauses keep their conditions, layouts become data. The ingestion discipline that decides whether retrieval has anything worth finding.
Why It Matters
Real documents are not clean text. They are PDFs with two-column layouts, tables whose meaning lives in their headers, contracts where a clause only makes sense with its qualifier, decks where the chart carries the point. Feed them through a text extractor and the structure, the part that carries the meaning, is the first thing lost.
Document intelligence is the discipline of not losing it. It runs before chunking, before embedding, before indexing, which is exactly why it is the most under-invested stage in the pipeline and the one that decides whether everything downstream works.
How It Works
Parsing goes beyond text extraction: layout analysis identifies what is a heading, a paragraph, a table, a figure caption; structure extraction preserves the relationships: this cell belongs to this header, this clause to this condition. The output is structured content that keeps its meaning intact when it becomes chunks.
The result changes what chunking can even do: a pipeline that knows where the table ends does not cut it in half.
Where It Breaks
The failures are silent and upstream. A flattened table retrieves as plausible text and answers wrong. A two-column layout extracted in reading-order interleaves two unrelated sections into one chunk. Headers separated from their rows produce data with no labels: numbers that match queries and mean nothing.
Because the damage happened at ingestion, every downstream stage receives corrupted input and produces confident output. Retrieval “works,” generation “works,” and the answer is wrong for reasons nobody can see in the trace.
How Flytebit Handles It
Ingestion gets engineering attention in our RAG work, not a library default: layout-aware parsing for structured documents, table extraction that preserves headers, and eval cases that specifically probe whether structure survived the pipeline. Ingestion is half the system; the evals measure it like it is.