What the documents look like
Brand outlet discount operations aim to clear out-of-season inventory and do not maintain a full-price new-arrival image. That objective shapes the material base for copy drafting: ERP inventory age, POS sales, outlet mall campaigns and historical discount records are the main data sources, and the day-to-day documents are discount approvals, slow-moving inventory lists, price tags and gross-margin worksheets. Statements about discount depth, inventory status or campaign period that appear in drafted copy need to correspond item by item with the original records in those documents.
The public brief places overall confidence at roughly accurate, with weekly and monthly update rhythms. Update cadence does not change what this page covers. Citation tracing asks whether a drafted sentence can be matched to source text inside the selected knowledge base, and that question is independent of how often the underlying documents are refreshed.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
The knowledge base search node can associate one or more knowledge bases that share the same vector model, and it outputs cited content as an array whose length may be zero. Once that output is handed to the answering step, every source claim in the answer should be traceable to the cited original text. The retrieval step does not perform permission isolation: the minimum relevance value is a filtering threshold, and a similarity score does not constitute a filter on business entities or authorization scope. Knowledge bases built on different vector models cannot be associated together; when checking, first verify the vector model identifier and exclude those that do not match, record the actual observation, and do not run cross-model retrieval in order to compare missed recalls.
Material timeliness needs separate checking. When the same document exists in a current version and a historical version, the test sources should cover both versions, and whether a given citation is adopted still has to be reviewed against the effective version. A node outputting an empty array does not mean the workflow has errored and stopped; downstream design can be checked against an explicitly paper-stated empty array.
Hypothetical drill sample: a brand outlet store channel-clearance team prepares clearance copy for out-of-season down jackets on 9 March 2026. The original material text supplied for checking consists of three sentences: "This batch of down jackets has an inventory age exceeding 180 days and is item 12 on the slow-moving inventory list." "The discount approval form states that the lowest discount is fifty percent of the tag price, with an approval date of 5 March 2026." "The price tags for this batch have been replaced with fifty-percent tags, with replacement completed on 8 March 2026." The draft sentence to be judged is: "This batch of down jackets has received fifty-percent clearance approval and is sold at fifty-percent price tags effective immediately." Authorization boundary: the material covers only this batch, this approval date and the tag replacement fact; it does not state a sales start or end date, and it does not state online channel authorization.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting point for this trial | Reason for the choice and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Associate only the knowledge base holding this batch's slow-moving list and discount approval form | Verify each base's vector model identifier first; only matching ones may be associated together. When compared with a base on a different vector model, exclude the latter |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Copy checking needs to hit both keywords such as "fifty percent" and "item 12 on the slow-moving inventory list" and semantically close phrasing; compare hit differences against pure semantic retrieval |
| Citation upper limit | Hypothetical starting point of 2000 tokens | The three material sentences total roughly 150 characters, so 2000 tokens leaves margin; compare with a lower value to observe whether key sentences are truncated |
| Minimum relevance | Hypothetical starting point of 0.3 | Treat as a filtering threshold to observe whether low-relevance fragments are excluded; compare with 0.5 to observe whether the original text is still recalled |
| Result reranking | Enabled for this trial | Performs a second ordering of text when candidates are numerous; compare with the disabled state to observe the ordering position of the original text |
| Reply format | Keep default | Copy checking does not need a fixed-structure return; compare with json_schema to see whether citation carry-over is affected |
Three common errors
- Treating a similarity score as authorization filtering. A recalled passage only indicates semantic closeness; it does not indicate that the batch has received discount approval. Checking should return to the discount approval form's original text and compare subject, batch and approval status field by field.
- Treating pending review as approved. In the hypothetical sample the approval form states an approval date of 5 March 2026. If another material shows "pending channel manager review", the two are different facts and cannot be merged into an approved state. Checking compares the value of the same field; only clearly mutually exclusive values in the same field constitute a contradiction.
- Treating retrieval output directly as the answer's source. After the node outputs the citation array, whether the answering step carries it over item by item needs separate checking. Under an empty-array input, a downstream answer that still generates source claims is a carry-over error.
How to verify the setup
- Input the three original sentences of the hypothetical sample together with the draft sentence, and compare whether "has received fifty-percent clearance approval" in the draft matches the approval form's original text on subject, batch and approval status. Expected observation: the cited content includes the approval form's original text, and the draft's approval statement is traceable; if the approval form's original text is absent from the citations, that statement is unsupported and should be recorded as pending verification.
- Input the draft sentence "is sold at fifty-percent price tags effective immediately", and compare the tag replacement completion date in the material against any recorded sales start or end date. Expected observation: the material states no sales start or end date, so the time-range statement is unsupported; do not judge it as a negation or a conflict, and preserve the evidence gap.
- Input an explicitly paper-stated empty array, and compare whether the downstream answer still generates source claims. Expected observation: when the downstream carries over an empty citation set, the answer contains no specific source claim; if one appears, record it as a carry-over design point needing review, and do not assert that a fictional-rule retrieval would necessarily return an empty array.
This page has checked public technical facts for identifying relevant content in documents; it does not require copying them as a fixed five-row table, and the body is written independently: associated knowledge bases require verifying the selected bases and material versions first, and only the same vector model may be associated together; the search node outputs a citation array whose length may be zero, and an empty array does not mean the workflow has errored and stopped; citation input carry-over requires checking whether retrieval output is passed to the answering step and comparing the answer against the cited original text item by item; citation display checking uses traceable samples to verify original-text display, and model thinking process or answer fluency does not substitute for source evidence; material timeliness checking tests sources with current and historical document versions, and whether a citation is adopted still has to be reviewed against the effective version.