What the documents look like
Import and export permit handling takes place before customs declaration and determines whether a shipment may lawfully cross a border. This page addresses one category of work: order fulfilment and after-sales question handling for automatic import licences, dual-use item licences, contracts, and product descriptions, with citation sources and traceability as the feature under examination. The materials come from commerce authority systems, customs commodity codes, supplier documents, and customer statements of use. Updates are irregular and per shipment. A citation error can lead to a blocked clearance, a contract breach, or an administrative penalty. Confidence in the general brief is approximate; any field not provided remains unknown.
For citation tracing, the practical consequence is that a licence record, a contract clause, and a product description each carry a different status and a different effective scope. A pending application, a quotation validity date, and a delivery date are separate facts. Retrieval returns text; it does not return an authorization state. The work therefore separates what a document states from what a downstream answer may claim.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
The knowledge base search node outputs cited content as an array, and the length may be zero. An empty array still passes through the output path. The citation limit is measured in tokens. The minimum relevance value is a 0-1 filter threshold that applies only in semantic retrieval or when result reranking is used. That threshold filters low-relevance results; it does not perform permission or entity isolation. Associated knowledge bases must share the same vector model; bases with different vector models cannot be associated together, so the identifier is checked and non-matching bases are excluded before any search.
Hypothetical drill sample. Source text one: "Company A submitted an automatic import licence application on 10 March 2025, accompanied by contract number HT-2025-0310, declaring a certain model of CNC machine tool, quantity 2 units." Source text two: "On 12 March 2025 the application was in a pending-review state; no issuance record was found." Source text three: "Contract HT-2025-0310 sets the delivery date as 30 April 2025, and the quotation is valid until 31 March 2025." Draft sentence to be assessed: "Company A's automatic import licence has been approved, and shipment can be arranged in mid-April 2025." The licence approval status is not stated in the materials; only pending review appears. The draft sentence is unsupported.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Setting on this page | Basis and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Only knowledge bases sharing the same vector model | Official documentation states that only the same vector model allows joint association |
| Search mode | Semantic retrieval or hybrid retrieval | Official documentation lists semantic, full-text, and hybrid modes |
| Citation limit | A hypothetical starting value in tokens for this drill | The documented unit is tokens; the starting value must be compared with sample length |
| Minimum relevance | A hypothetical starting value within the 0-1 range | Documented as effective only in semantic retrieval or reranking |
| Result reranking | ReRank enabled according to settings | Documented as requiring a model and enabled by configuration |
| Citation output handoff | Check whether the citation array is passed to the answering step | Documented as an array output whose length may be zero |
Three common errors
- Treating pending review as approval. In the sample, the licence is in a pending-review state, while the draft sentence says "has been approved." The input is source text two; the comparison is between the state "pending review" and the state "approved"; the observable result is that the two do not match, and the claim is unsupported.
- Treating quotation validity as a supply deadline. In the sample, the quotation is valid until 31 March 2025, while the delivery date is 30 April 2025. The input is source text three; the comparison is between two distinct fields; the observable result is that they refer to different matters and cannot substitute for each other.
- Treating retrieval results as authorization to act. The search node outputs a citation array and does not constitute approval or release. The input is the citation array; the comparison is between retrieval output and authorization state; the observable result is that retrieval does not change the authorization state, and the business action requires a separate downstream implementation.
How to verify the setup
- Input source text one and the draft sentence; compare the licence approval status field. The observable result is that the materials do not state approval while the draft asserts it, so the claim is unsupported and the evidence gap is recorded.
- Input source text three; compare the quotation validity field and the delivery date field. The observable result is that they are different fields with different values and cannot replace each other.
- Input a paper citation array of [] and compare it with the downstream answering step design. The observable result is that the downstream step accepts an empty array; no claim is made that a fictional rule search necessarily returns [].
Knowledge bases with different vector models cannot be associated together; the identifier is checked, non-matching bases are excluded, and the actual observation is recorded. Image retrieval requires corresponding image input and model capability. Reranking requires a model and is enabled by configuration. A thinking budget is a reasoning budget and is not the citation token limit. RRF is a fusion process for mixed results, not a switch.