Near-Miss Retrieval in RAG: Why Semantic Chunking Lost the Data and Hierarchical Chunking Found It

The retrieval pipeline returned chunks that mentioned vaccination schedules but didn't contain the actual schedule data. The model saw evidence that was on-topic but empty of the answer - and correctly refused. The root cause wasn't the model, the reranker, or the query. It was the chunking strategy splitting tables and structured data away from the prose that named them.