Long Document LLM Processing Pipeline

Extracted: 2026-02-08 (updated 2026-02-09) Context: When processing documents over ~50K characters through LLM APIs for extraction, generation, or analysis tasks.

Problem

Sending large documents (>50K chars) as a single LLM prompt causes:

1. Lost in the Middle - LLMs lose attention on content in the middle of long inputs (30%+ accuracy drop, per Liu et al. 2023)
2. High cost - Entire document becomes input tokens even if only portions are relevant
3. No partial retry - If generation fails, must re-process the entire document
4. No parallelism - Single sequential API call

Solution: 6-Step Pipeline