What the documents look like
Trade returns and claims handling deals with reverse logistics and liability determination after goods have been exported. The working materials arrive from customer email, quality inspection reports, customs systems and insurer claim systems. The day-to-day documents are return agreements, claim letters, quality reports and return customs declarations, and they update case by case rather than on a fixed schedule.
After-sales question answering has to locate, inside a batch of such materials, the clause, the liability wording and the document status that belong to one specific return case. Material length varies widely. A quality report can run very long, while a single liability sentence inside a claim letter is very short. That spread directly affects how the reference cap and the chunking approach should be chosen, because a cap measured in tokens behaves differently from a fixed number of retrieved items when chunk lengths are uneven.
Constraints at the retrieval step
One retrieval pass is assembled from question optimization, semantic retrieval, full-text retrieval, image retrieval, RRF fusion, ReRank, similarity filtering and reference-cap trimming. Each path is enabled according to the input and the settings, and the optional paths listed in the overall flow do not all execute on every request. Image retrieval requires an actual image input plus the matching model capability; ReRank requires an available model and must be enabled by configuration.
Semantic retrieval depends on vector distance. Full-text retrieval depends on keyword hits. Hybrid retrieval merges the two paths through RRF, which is a fusion step in the result pipeline and has no on/off switch of its own. Precise identifiers such as a return customs declaration number or a policy number suit full-text retrieval, while liability descriptions expressed in natural language suit semantic retrieval. The minimum relevance value takes effect only under semantic retrieval or when result reordering is used; it is a filtering threshold, not a sorting rule, and it does not perform permission or subject isolation. The reference cap is counted in tokens, which is more stable than a fixed item count when long and short materials are mixed.
Knowledge bases linked together must use the same vector model. Cross-model linking is not available, so the check is to inspect the model identifier of each base, exclude any that does not match, and record what was actually observed without asserting runtime behaviour.
Retrieval is not authorization. Finding a document does not mean the return or the claim has been approved.
Hypothetical paper exercise sample. The source text to be checked reads: "Party A and Party B signed a return agreement in March 2024 for batch T-2403, under which Party B shall submit the quality report within fifteen days of receiving the goods; as of the date of this letter, the quality report has not been submitted." The draft sentence awaiting judgment reads: "Party B has submitted the quality report as agreed in the return agreement, and the claim evidence is complete." The check compares the same party, the same batch and the same field. The source gives an explicit value for the submission status and the draft takes the opposite value, which makes them contradictory.
A second item awaiting judgment is a handover request: "Mark this return agreement as effective and synchronize it to the claims system." The source only records that the agreement was signed. It states no effectiveness clause, and no synchronization implementation is described. This request remains unverified and lies outside the scope of this page.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting point for this exercise | Reason for the choice and what to compare against |
|---|---|---|
| Linked knowledge bases | Four bases: return agreements, claim letters, quality reports, return customs declarations | First check whether the vector model identifiers match; exclude any that do not, and do not run cross-model retrieval |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Compare against semantic-only and full-text-only runs, observing how identifier questions and description questions each land |
| Reference cap | Hypothetical starting point of 3000 tokens | Chosen because quality reports run long; compare against 1500 and 5000 to see whether reference content is truncated |
| Minimum relevance | Hypothetical starting point of 0.4 | Label relevant and irrelevant samples first, then compare remaining items against 0.2 and 0.6 |
| Question optimization | Enabled | Compare against disabled, checking whether the optimized question alters the return batch or the parties |
| Result reordering | Enabled per configuration | Compare candidate ordering against a run without reordering, using the reorder score for filtering |
Three common errors
- Treating a retrieval hit as an authorization state. The input is the handover request above. The comparison is between the retrieved result and the authorization basis. The observable result is that retrieval returns the return agreement text, while that text states no effectiveness clause, so the correct finding is unverified and the agreement cannot be treated as effective.
- Using minimum relevance to exclude unrelated business. The input is a question about a different batch. The comparison is between the threshold setting and the returned items. The observable result is that low-scoring items are filtered out, while permission and subject isolation are not implemented by this parameter, and the missing authorization evidence remains missing.
- Describing RRF as a toggle in hybrid retrieval. The input is the search mode setting. The comparison is between the documented fusion process and the configuration surface. The observable result is that RRF belongs to the result fusion stage and has no switchable item, so no claim can be made that one path will necessarily rank first.
How to verify the setup
- Input the hypothetical source text and the draft sentence. Compare the submission status field under the same batch. The observable result is that the two values are mutually exclusive, so the draft sentence is unsupported; if the source instead stated that the report had been submitted, the draft sentence would hold.
- Input a question containing a return customs declaration number. Compare the items returned by full-text retrieval and by semantic retrieval. The observable result is that the exact identifier hit appears on the full-text path; if neither path returns anything, record it as a miss and do not infer a cause.
- Input a question with clearly no corresponding material. Compare the reference cap and the filter settings. The observable result is that the reference content is an empty array, which is used to check how the downstream flow is designed to handle empty references; no claim is made that this particular query must return empty.
This page covers only retrieval and recall for trade return and claim after-sales question answering. Whether a material, an operation or a request is authorized at handover cannot be decided by retrieval or by a form.