What the documents look like
Certificates of origin serve import-country tariff and customs clearance purposes, and a certificate of origin engagement is not necessarily governed by a letter of credit. The comparison baseline for contract and transaction materials may therefore come from the customer's clearance requirements or from enterprise production records. The documents handled day to day include certificate of origin applications, commercial invoices, packing lists, and production cost materials. These materials update per shipment; one consignment may involve several certificate drafts and several invoice versions. The retrieval step takes a comparison question and returns candidate content from already-ingested materials so that a person can check it afterwards. The knowledge base search node can associate one or more knowledge bases that use the same vector model, and it outputs references as an array whose length can be 0.
Constraints at the retrieval step
The comparison task requires the same subject, the same period, and the same field. Retrieval supplies candidate content only; it does not decide whether two values conflict. Semantic recall and relevance scores do not carry out permission or entity isolation, and the same-vector-model requirement for associated knowledge bases does not extend to external systems such as business registration sites. Hybrid retrieval merges multiple result paths through RRF; this is part of the retrieval process, not a switch that an operator turns on. Reranking requires a model and must be enabled according to the setting. Image retrieval requires image input and matching model capability. For empty-result handling, a paper input of [] can be used to check the downstream design.
Hypothetical drill sample: the source material reads "Exporter: East China Machinery Parts Plant (paper name); Invoice No.: HX-2024-031; Invoice date: 12 March 2024; Goods: bearing rings, 2,000 pieces; Contract No.: HT-2024-018; Contract signing date: 1 March 2024." The draft sentence to be assessed reads "The goods in this batch correspond to contract HT-2024-018, which took effect on 1 March 2024." The source supports only the contract signing date and states no effective-date clause, so the draft sentence is unsupported and remains to be verified. A separate handover request reads "Please change the consignee name on invoice HX-2024-031 so that it matches contract HT-2024-018." This request concerns a field change and requires a person to check the authorization boundary; a retrieval result does not constitute authorization.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting point for this drill | Reason and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Associate only certificate of origin knowledge bases that share one vector model | Check the vector model identifier, exclude bases with a different model, and do not run cross-model retrieval |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Compare recalled content against semantic retrieval and full-text retrieval separately, and observe the difference in hits for identifiers and natural-language questions |
| Reference limit | 2000 tokens as the hypothetical starting point | Test with materials of different lengths to see whether content stays complete, and compare against a shorter limit to observe truncation |
| Minimum relevance | 0.35 as the hypothetical starting point | Label relevant and irrelevant samples first, then compare the number of candidates remaining after filtering against 0.5 |
| Question optimization | Enabled in this hypothetical setup | Compare the original question with the optimized question and check whether the subject was changed incorrectly |
| Result reranking | Enabled in this hypothetical setup | Compare ordering before and after reranking and confirm that candidates are sufficient |
Three common errors
- Treating a retrieval hit as authorization. Input: the draft sentence "Contract HT-2024-018 took effect." Retrieval returns content about the contract signing date. The error lies in equating a signing date with the fact of taking effect. Compare the same field; when no effective-date clause is stated, record the item as unsupported.
- Treating an empty result as negative evidence. Input: the paper query []. The reference output has length 0. The error lies in concluding from this that the contract does not exist. Record the gap and do not infer a negative.
- Associating knowledge bases across different vector models. Input: two knowledge base identifiers whose vector model identifiers differ. The error lies in merging the retrieval directly. Check the identifiers first, exclude the non-matching base, and record what was actually observed.
How to verify the setup
- Enter the hypothetical source material and the draft sentence "The goods in this batch correspond to contract HT-2024-018, which took effect on 1 March 2024." Compare the same field: the source has only the signing date and no effective-date clause. The observed result is that the draft sentence is unsupported and remains to be verified; it is not judged to be a conflict.
- Enter the paper query [] and observe whether the reference output length is 0, then check whether the downstream design accepts an empty result. Do not claim that a fictional rule retrieval necessarily returns [].
- Enter two knowledge base identifiers whose vector model identifiers differ, and compare whether the identifiers match. The observed result is that the non-matching base is excluded, cross-model retrieval is not executed, and the actual observation is recorded.