What the documents look like
General trade import declaration work turns on the customs value, freight and insurance, and the payment of duties and taxes. The material comes from the International Trade Single Window, the customs tariff, forwarder arrival notices, and foreign exchange payment vouchers. Each declaration produces a customs declaration form, a commercial invoice, a packing list, a bill of lading, and a contract, and these five document types are the main objects that knowledge base retrieval has to reach.
In order fulfilment and after-sales question answering, a customs manager or a customs broker checks the transaction terms, the declared basis for freight and insurance, and the requirements for cooperating with a customs inspection against those materials. The consequences that retrieval is meant to reduce are supplementary duty with a late declaration, cargo sitting at port, and administrative penalty. Completeness and traceability of the cited content therefore matter more than the number of items recalled.
Constraints at the retrieval step
The knowledge base search node can associate one or more knowledge bases that use the same vector model. Bases built on different vector models cannot be associated together; the operator checks the model identifier first and excludes those that do not match, rather than running a cross-model search to compare what was missed. The citation limit is measured in tokens and controls how much content a single search may cite at most. The minimum relevance value is a 0-1 filter threshold and takes effect only in semantic retrieval or when result reranking is used; it does not perform permission or entity isolation. Hybrid retrieval merges multiple result paths through RRF, and Rerank reorders candidate text a second time; both require the corresponding model and are enabled according to the configuration. An empty result is output as an array whose length may be 0, and the downstream link still runs.
Hypothetical paper exercise sample: a customs manager at an importer submits a handover request awaiting a decision. The source text reads: "Contract No. HT-2024-088, transaction terms CIF, freight and insurance borne by the seller to Shanghai port, bill of lading dated 10 June 2024, commercial invoice amount USD 52,000." The proposed sentence reads: "Freight and insurance under this contract are paid separately by the buyer." The pending request reads: "Search the knowledge base to confirm who bears freight and insurance and reply to the customer." The source text does not state that the buyer pays freight and insurance separately. The proposed sentence and the source text take mutually exclusive values in the same field, so the proposed sentence is unsupported.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting point for this exercise | Reason and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge base | One base holding the customs declaration forms, invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, and contracts | Check that the vector model identifier is the same across the base and exclude bases on other models |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | For identifier-type questions, compare full-text and semantic results and observe whether the identifier is matched |
| Citation limit | 2000 tokens | Test with real materials of different lengths for content completeness and compare against a shorter value |
| Minimum relevance | 0.3 | Label related and unrelated samples first, then compare what is retained after filtering |
| Question optimisation | Enabled | Compare the original question with the optimised question and check whether the subject was altered incorrectly |
| Result reranking | Enabled according to the configuration | Confirm the rerank model is available and compare candidate order before and after reranking |
Three common errors
- Treating minimum relevance as a permission or entity filter. The input is a cross-entity query, the comparison is whether the returned content includes records outside the authorised set, and the observable result is whether data for unrelated entities is still returned. Minimum relevance only filters low-relevance results and does not exclude unauthorised records.
- Associating knowledge bases that use different vector models. The input is two bases with different vector model identifiers, the comparison is whether the node allows both to be selected at once, and the observable result is the association that is produced. The documentation requires the same vector model; bases that do not match are excluded and the observation is recorded.
- Treating a request awaiting review as an approved execution. The input is a handover request reading "search and reply to the customer", the comparison is the request status against the authorisation boundary, and the observable result is whether an approval record exists. A pending request does not show that operating authority is absent, and it is not the same as authorisation to execute.
How to verify the setup
- Enter the source text and the proposed sentence from the hypothetical sample, compare whether the proposed sentence "freight and insurance are paid separately by the buyer" and the source text "freight and insurance borne by the seller" take mutually exclusive values in the same field, and observe whether the finding is unsupported. The expected outcome is unsupported; no claim is made that this was actually tested.
- Enter an empty result array [] and compare whether the downstream design accepts a citation output of length 0, then observe whether the link runs. The expected outcome is that it runs; no claim is made that a fictional rule search necessarily returns [].
- Enter a query containing identifier HT-2024-088, compare identifier matching between full-text retrieval and hybrid retrieval, and observe whether the corresponding contract data is recalled. The expected outcome is an observable difference in matching; first-position matching or full recall is not guaranteed.
This page addresses only general trade import declaration, order fulfilment and after-sales question answering, and knowledge base retrieval and recall. Which materials, operations, and requests sit at which authorisation state during an operational handover is a separate question, and retrieval or a form is not authorisation to execute.