What the data for this category looks like
Carbon steel industry data sources mainly include daily steel mill ex-factory price reports, monthly supply and demand reports from the China Iron and Steel Association, weekly customs import and export reports, futures exchange market data, and securities firm industry research reports. Document formats cover PDF research reports, Excel price ledgers, and Word analysis reports. The update rhythms vary significantly: ex-factory prices are updated daily, supply and demand data is updated monthly, and futures market data is updated in real time. Document structures center on structured tables, with fields such as production volume, inventory, and unit price per ton, with corresponding units of 10,000 tons, 10,000 tons, and yuan/ton respectively. These are paired with paragraph-style industry trend analysis and chart data.
What constraints do these characteristics impose on the "document parsing and chunking" link
The core of carbon steel industry data sources is structured tables. Plain text chunking will split the row and column associations of tables, leading to failure to match complete price and corresponding time information during subsequent retrieval. High-frequency updated real-time market data and monthly reports require incremental parsing to avoid repeated processing of already parsed historical data. A large number of fields with specific units are included in documents. Unit information must be retained during parsing, otherwise the actual meaning of the data will be lost. Long documents (such as quarterly research reports with more than 50 pages) need to be chunked according to chapter logic to ensure the integrity of analysis content.
How to set the configurations
| Configuration Item | Recommended Value | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
chunk_size | 800–1200 characters | Adapts to the conventional length of table rows and analysis paragraphs in carbon steel documents, avoiding splitting complete structured data or analysis logic |
chunk_overlap | 100–150 characters | Retains contextually connected content across chunks, ensuring continuous descriptions such as price trends and supply and demand changes are not cut off |
parse_table_mode | full_table | Fully extracts structured tables from carbon steel documents, retains fields such as production volume and unit price per ton along with their corresponding units, preventing loss of data meaning |
PARSE_FILE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS | 300 seconds | A single carbon steel monthly report contains multiple pages of charts and tables; the default timeout duration is insufficient for complete parsing |
enable_table_extract | Enabled | Forcibly extracts table data from documents, ensuring the integrity of structured fields |
max_chunk_per_file | 50 | Adapts to the chapter structure of carbon steel documents, avoiding excessive chunks per file that lead to retrieval redundancy |
The parameter values provided on this page are common recommended starting points for configuration. Actual values are affected by material form, data volume and business rules. Specific issues require targeted analysis. It is recommended to test on your own samples before finalizing settings.
Three common mistakes
- Phenomenon: A
504 Gateway Timeouterror is returned when parsing a carbon steel monthly supply and demand report. Cause: ThePARSE_FILE_TIMEOUT_SECONDSparameter is not adjusted, and the default timeout duration is insufficient for parsing multiple tables and long texts. - Phenomenon: Units of fields such as unit price per ton and inventory are lost during chunking; for example, yuan/ton is extracted as a pure number. Cause: The
enable_table_extractconfiguration is not enabled, and field and unit information of structured data is not retained. - Phenomenon: Complete price trend analysis content cannot be retrieved when calling the knowledge base query interface. Cause: The
chunk_overlapparameter is set to 0, and cross-chunk context is completely cut off, leading to broken trend descriptions.
How to confirm the configuration is correct
- Upload a typical carbon steel monthly research report, check the parsed chunk list, and confirm that each chunk contains complete table paragraphs or structured data.
- Perform a retrieval test, enter keywords specific to carbon steel such as "unit price per ton" and "10,000 tons", and confirm that the retrieval results include content with corresponding fields and units.
- Check the parsing log, confirm that the
PARSE_FILE_TIMEOUT_SECONDSparameter takes effect, and there are no timeout error records. - Call the document parsing API interface, verify that the returned chunk data contains correct fields and unit information.
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.