What the documents look like
Brand concession operations at a shopping mall rely on four core document types: the joint-operation concession contract, the mall activity letter, sales receipts, and the monthly reconciliation statement. Because the mall operates unified cashiering and settles on a concession-fee basis, concession sales are recorded by the mall POS, while the brand ERP and finance systems each retain their own figures. Monthly settlement differences directly affect activity resources and the concession's continued presence in the mall. Materials update daily and monthly, and comparison work must stay on the same entity, the same period, and the same field.
For this page, the comparison task is contract versus transaction materials, and the feature is citation source tracing. The knowledge-base search node can associate one or more knowledge bases that share the same vector model, and it outputs citations as an array whose length may be zero. Each citation must be checked back against its source text. Answer fluency and the model's thinking process do not substitute for source evidence. Semantic recall and relevance scores handle similarity ranking; they do not handle permission or entity isolation. Hybrid retrieval merges multiple result paths through RRF, and reranking runs according to its setting. When current and historical versions of a document both exist, whether a citation is adopted still depends on review against the effective version.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
Assumed drill sample: a concession's March 2025 joint-operation concession contract, clause 4.2, states: "The concession fee ratio for the concession counter's tax-inclusive sales for the current month is 18%; temporary concession fee ratios confirmed in writing by both parties during an activity period are agreed separately." The mall activity letter dated 10 March 2025 states: "Mall-wide activity from 15 March to 17 March; participating counters settle the concession fee at 16%, and the original ratio resumes after the activity ends." The March 2025 monthly reconciliation statement states: "Activity-period sales RMB 86,000, concession fee 16%; non-activity-period sales RMB 214,000, concession fee 18%." Draft sentence to be judged: "This contract sets the concession fee ratio for the full month of March at 16%."
The citation tracing step carries several constraints. The search node's association rule requires the same vector model, so a knowledge base built on a different vector model cannot be jointly associated; check the identifier and exclude mismatches rather than running a cross-model search to compare recall. Citation output is an array that may be empty, and an empty array does not mean the workflow has terminated with an error. Relevance is a filtering threshold, not a final sort order, and it does not exclude unrelated businesses or unauthorized records. Retrieval is not authorization: whether a concession fee is settled, whether activity resources are issued, and whether a contract takes effect are downstream business actions that require their own review and execution. When a document has a current version and a historical version, the citation still needs human review against the effective version.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration or check item | Assumed starting point for this drill | Reason and comparison object |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Select only the knowledge base holding this concession's contract and reconciliation materials under one vector model | Compare vector model identifiers against another knowledge base; exclude any base whose identifier does not match |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Compare against semantic retrieval and full-text retrieval; ratio and numbered fields need keyword hits |
| Citation upper limit | Assumed starting point of a number of tokens | Compare against the length of the reconciliation statement text so activity-period and non-activity-period entries can be cited in full |
| Minimum relevance | Assumed starting point of a medium value | Compare against the result of checking each citation back to source text; a value set too low increases irrelevant fragments |
| Result reranking | Enabled according to its setting | Compare candidate ordering with the setting not enabled, to judge whether ratio fields stay near the top |
| Citation handoff | Pass the citation array to the answering step and check each item against source text | Compare against an empty-array case; when length is zero the downstream path still runs |
Three common errors
- Treating the activity-period temporary concession fee ratio as the full-month ratio. Contract clause 4.2 and the activity letter state 16% for the activity period and 18% for the non-activity period respectively. The draft sentence writes 16% as a full-month ratio, which conflicts with the differing field values in the source text.
- Treating a retrieval hit as authorization or a settlement basis. A citation only shows that material was recalled. Concession fee settlement and activity resource issuance require downstream business review and execution; the retrieval step produces no authorization.
- Jointly associating knowledge bases built on different vector models. The node requires the same vector model, and mismatched identifiers should be excluded and recorded. Any missed recall or redundancy that might follow a cross-model association is an unobserved matter.
How to verify the setup
- Input the assumed source text of contract clause 4.2, the activity letter, and the monthly reconciliation statement, then compare the draft sentence "full-month concession fee 16%" against the source values of 16% for the activity period and 18% for the non-activity period. When the draft sentence disagrees with the source text, judge it as unsupported and require separate statements for the activity period and the non-activity period.
- Input a query that concerns only the activity period, then compare whether the citations include both the corresponding activity letter entry and the corresponding reconciliation statement entry. When the non-activity-period entry is absent from the citations, record this as insufficient citation scope; do not judge that the source text does not exist.
- Input a query that crosses counters or periods, then compare whether the returned citations fall within the associated knowledge base and the specified period. When materials from another counter or another period are returned, record this as retrieval scope differing from expectation; permission and entity isolation must be implemented by downstream systems, and the retrieval result itself does not constitute authorization.