What This Category of Data Looks Like
Steel trade research report data primarily comes from domestic steel industry associations, monthly and weekly production and sales reports from major steel mills, port inventory monitoring data, and trader spot price ledgers. Update frequencies cover daily (spot prices), weekly (inventory and transportation data), and monthly (industry supply and demand analysis). Most documents are in PDF format, containing structured tables and plain-text analysis paragraphs. Fields include dedicated units such as price per ton (yuan/ton), total inventory (10,000 tons), monthly trading volume (10,000 tons), and import and export tariff rates. Some documents include regional breakdown data and policy interpretation modules.
What Constraints Do These Characteristics Impose on Document Parsing and Chunking
Structured tables account for a large share of steel trade research reports, and they include dedicated unit fields. Parsing must retain the row and column correspondence of tables to avoid breaking the binding between cell content and units. Documents with multiple update frequencies are mixed together. Parsing must adapt to the parsing priority of different documents to avoid delayed parsing of high-frequency updated spot data. Regional breakdown data and industry policy paragraphs are interspersed throughout. Chunking must divide boundaries by data type (spot, inventory, policy) to prevent cross-category content from being merged into the same chunk. Some documents include embedded Excel supplementary reports. Parsing components must support extracting complete fields from embedded tables to avoid losing structured data.
Configuration Settings
| Configuration Item | Recommended Setting | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
PARSE_TABLE_STRUCTURE | Enabled | Steel trade research reports contain large numbers of structured price and inventory tables. Enabling this setting retains row and column correspondence, preventing field loss |
CHUNK_SIZE | 800–1200 characters | Single-paragraph analysis and table blocks in steel research reports are moderately sized. This range ensures each chunk contains complete price ranges and analysis context, avoiding core data being split across chunks |
CHUNK_OVERLAP | 100–150 characters | Cross-paragraph policy connections and data linkages exist in research reports. The overlap interval ensures contextual coherence, improving retrieval recall accuracy |
UPLOAD_FILE_MAX_SIZE | 500 MB | Some monthly industry research reports include collections of multiple historical data sets. This upper limit covers most bulk upload scenarios |
PARSE_FILE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS | 120 seconds | Large research reports with multiple embedded tables require longer processing times. This duration avoids timeout interruptions |
ENABLE_OCR | Triggered only for scanned PDFs | Most steel trade research reports are editable PDFs. Enabling OCR only for scanned documents saves parsing resources while ensuring accurate content extraction from scanned copies |
The parameter values provided on this page are common starting points for configuration setup. 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 Mistakes
- Issue: Some table cell data is missing from parsed documents. Cause: The
PARSE_TABLE_STRUCTUREconfiguration is not enabled. The parsing component defaults to extracting only plain-text paragraphs, ignoring structured table content. - Issue: A
413 Request Entity Too Largeerror is returned when uploading large monthly research reports. Cause: TheUPLOAD_FILE_MAX_SIZEconfiguration is not adjusted. The default upper limit is insufficient to accommodate large documents that include collections of multiple historical data sets. - Issue: Chunking results merge adjacent regional steel price data into the same chunk. Cause: Chunking boundaries are not set by data type, and the
CHUNK_OVERLAPvalue does not cover the linkage logic of cross-regional data.
How to Confirm Correct Configuration
- Upload a steel spot research report that includes structured tables. Check if the parsed content fully retains the table row and column structure, and verify that the units of core fields match the original document.
- Extract a segment of research report text that includes regional breakdown data, run a chunking test, and confirm that chunk boundaries align with data types (spot, policy, inventory).
- Upload a single large research report that exceeds the default upload limit, check if the upload succeeds, and confirm that the configuration item adapts to the document size.
- Review parsing logs to confirm that parsing duration does not exceed the set threshold, and that no timeout error records exist.
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.