What the data for this category looks like
Minor metals industry data sources include monthly supply and demand reports released by the Minor Metals Branch of the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association, annual capacity announcements from mining enterprises, daily reports from professional spot trading platforms, and weekly import and export statistics from the General Administration of Customs. Update cycles cover daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly updates. Most documents are in PDF format, containing text analysis, image-based supply and demand balance sheets, bar charts, and spot price tables. Fields include grade (%), metal tonnage output, yuan/tonne-degree, USD/kg, and other units. Some documents mix data of the same category with different units. The density of technical terms is high.
What constraints do these characteristics impose on document parsing and chunking?
The multi-source nature and complex format of minor metals industry documents create multiple constraints for parsing and chunking workflows. Image-based tables and charts require OCR support to extract complete text. Large-volume quarterly reports need adapted longer parsing durations and higher upload limits. Field units are strongly linked to their corresponding values. Chunking must retain context to avoid splitting related content. Dense technical terms require chunk lengths to align with the logical units of professional content. Chunks must not be too short to prevent semantic breaks, nor too long to reduce retrieval accuracy.
How to set configurations
| Configuration Item | Recommended Setting | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
PARSE_OCR_ENABLE | Enabled | Minor metals industry documents often include image-based spot price tables and capacity bar charts. Pure text content cannot be extracted directly from these files |
CHUNK_MAX_SIZE | 800–1200 characters | Minor metals documents contain multi-unit fields such as yuan/tonne-degree and USD/kg. Excessively long segments split units from their corresponding values. Excessively short segments lose supply and demand logical connections |
UPLOAD_FILE_MAX_SIZE | 1000 MB | Quarterly industry supply and demand balance reports include multi-page charts and data tables. Single-file volume can reach hundreds of megabytes |
PARSE_FILE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS | 600 seconds | Large-volume multi-page documents require traversing charts and text blocks. This setting avoids mid-process interruptions |
RECALL_TOP_N | Top 8–12 results | Minor metals investment research documents have high technical term density. Too many retrieved results introduce irrelevant context. Too few results fail to cover supply and demand logic comprehensively |
SIMILARITY_THRESHOLD | 0.75–0.85 | Duplicate industry policy summaries must be filtered out. Differentiated supply and demand data fragments must be retained |
The parameter values provided on this page are common starting points for configuration. Actual values are affected by material format, data volume, and business rules. Specific issues require targeted analysis. It is recommended to test on your own samples before finalizing settings.
Three Common Configuration Errors
- Scenario: When uploading a single minor metals quarterly report larger than 500 MB, an "offset out of range" error appears when parsing progress reaches 90%. Cause: The
UPLOAD_FILE_MAX_SIZEandPARSE_FILE_TIMEOUT_SECONDSparameters are not adjusted. Memory usage exceeds limits during large-file parsing, leading to index offset. - Scenario: Chunked results show "yuan/tonne" separated from its corresponding value, making it impossible to link to minor metals category pricing data. Cause: No reasonable
CHUNK_MAX_SIZEis set. Segmentation splits the context between units and their values. - Scenario: Network errors frequently cause upload interruptions when batch uploading multiple minor metals industry documents. Cause: The
UPLOAD_CONCURRENCYparameter is not configured. Excessive concurrent uploads exhaust server resources.
How to confirm correct configuration
- Upload a minor metals monthly report that includes image-based tables. Verify that parsed results contain complete table text and OCR-recognized values.
- Manually split a document fragment containing unit fields. Compare the fragment with system chunked results to confirm that units and their corresponding values are not split into different segments.
- Submit an investment research query for minor metals supply and demand data. Confirm that the number and similarity of retrieved results meet expectations, with no large volumes of duplicate content.
- Upload a single quarterly report larger than 500 MB. Wait for parsing to complete, and confirm that no timeout or offset errors occur.
Question material comes from public community discussions. Configuration values are common starting points and should be measured against your own samples. Verified on 2026-09-14.