Multi-turn Dialogue and Prompt Engineering for Engineering Consulting Research Report Retrieval

Engineering consulting research report data primarily comes from public reports released by construction and decoration industry associations

What this category of data looks like

Engineering consulting research report data primarily comes from public reports released by construction and decoration industry associations, engineering construction policy documents issued by housing and urban-rural development authorities, project feasibility study reports, and cost consulting achievement documents. Update cadence adjusts dynamically alongside policy releases and project progress, with no fixed cycle. Regular project reports are updated quarterly, while policy documents take effect immediately upon issuance. Most documents use a mixed structured and semi-structured format, containing fields such as project ID, construction location, total investment, sub-item cost, construction period plan, risk level, etc. Cost-related fields mostly use ten thousand yuan or hundred million yuan as units, construction period uses months as the unit, and building area uses square meters as the unit.

What constraints do these characteristics impose on multi-turn dialogue and prompt engineering

The mixed structured nature of engineering consulting research reports requires clearly distinguishing the boundary between structured field extraction and free text interpretation during multi-turn dialogue. Prompts must preset field mapping rules. The lack of a fixed update cycle requires the retrieval link to associate the latest release timestamp to avoid returning expired policies or completed project data. With multiple coexisting units, prompts must mandate attaching standard units when outputting to prevent confusion between values such as cost and construction period. The existence of unique identifier fields such as project ID requires binding the corresponding project identifier to conversation history, to avoid cross-session data interference.

How to set the configurations

Configuration ItemRecommended Value RangeRationale
maxContext8000–12000 charactersIndividual engineering consulting research reports often exceed 3000 characters, and multi-turn dialogue requires retaining multiple report fragments and complete conversation history
recallTopKTop 8–12 resultsEngineering research reports cover multi-dimensional content including cost, construction period, compliance, etc. A small number of retrieved results will easily miss key information
similarityThreshold0.72–0.80Engineering research reports are dense with professional terminology, requiring a balance between retrieval precision and coverage. A value that is too low will introduce irrelevant content, while a value that is too high will miss relevant reports
PARSE_FILE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS300 secondsLarge-scale feasibility study reports have complex structures, and field parsing takes a long time. This avoids task interruption due to timeout
customSessionBindEnable and bind the project ID fieldEngineering consulting conversations are mostly carried out for individual projects, requiring isolation of historical records by project identifier to avoid cross-session data interference
reRankTopNTop 4–6 resultsRe-ranking can filter low-correlation retrieval results and retain the most relevant professional content for the current conversation stage

The parameter values provided on this page are all conventional recommendations used to establish a starting point for configuration. Actual values are affected by material form, data volume, and business rules. Specific issues require specific analysis, and it is recommended to test on your own samples before finalizing settings.

Three common mistakes to avoid

  • Specifying customUid when calling the API to initiate a conversation, but retrieving all conversation data when obtaining historical records. This occurs because the function to bind sessions by customUid in the session storage configuration is not enabled, resulting in sessions not being isolated by unique identifiers.
  • Receiving a 404 Not Found error when connecting to an external model. This occurs because the model access path is not configured correctly, and the professional model call format required for engineering consulting research report retrieval is not matched.
  • Cost, construction period and other values returned by the conversation do not have corresponding units attached, making them impossible to directly use for project accounting. This occurs because the prompt does not clearly require attaching standard units when outputting, and does not adapt to the characteristic of multiple coexisting units in engineering consulting data.

How to confirm that configurations are properly set

  • Initiate a parsing task for a single large-scale engineering research report, check the task log to confirm that the parsing duration does not exceed the configured PARSE_FILE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS value, and no timeout-related errors occur.
  • Enter a query covering multiple dimensions including cost, construction period, compliance, etc., verify that the number of retrieved results falls within the recallTopK configuration range, and the re-ranked results cover the core query requirements.
  • Initiate two conversations bound to different customUids, obtain historical records for each, and confirm that data from the two sessions does not interfere with each other.
  • Enter a query related to cost, confirm that the returned results attach standard units, in line with the output requirements configured in the prompt.

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.