What the documents look like
Fresh-food concession counters in hypermarkets are frequently run by supplier staff working on site under a sales-share arrangement. Store service and internal training therefore involve three parties at once: the hypermarket fresh-food department, the concession supplier, and the store manager. The documents handled day to day are the concession contract, the daily sales report, the shrinkage record, and the food purchase inspection record, with data updated daily or per batch. These materials together determine whether a citation can be traced to a specific batch, a specific date, and a specific authorization state. The central difficulty for citation tracing in this category is that one document can carry sales data, shrinkage allocation, and food-safety inspection information at the same time. Field ownership must be separated during checking; the overall existence of a document does not substitute for the validity of one field.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
The knowledge base search node can be linked to one or more knowledge bases that use the same vector model, and it outputs citations as an array whose length may be zero. An empty array means the search path ran through without retrieving content; it does not mean the workflow terminated with an error. Citation content must be passed to the answering step and checked line by line against the original text. A thinking process or a fluent answer does not replace source evidence. Checking document timeliness requires testing sources with the current version and a historical version; whether a citation is adopted still depends on review of the effective version. Retrieval by itself does not constitute authorization, and a similarity score does not perform permission or entity isolation.
Hypothetical drill sample: A hypermarket fresh-food department signs a concession contract with a concession supplier, contract number HYP-2024-031, signed on 12 March 2024, providing that from 1 April 2024 a concession counter is set up in the fresh-food area of Store A, with a sales-share ratio of 18 percent of sales, valid until 31 March 2025. The food purchase inspection record dated 6 May 2024 states: the supplier delivered 120 kg of chilled pork that day, batch number P-20240506-01, the inspector signature is store fresh-food department employee Zhang, and the record status is inspected. The shrinkage record for the same day states: 3.2 kg of that batch of chilled pork was written off, the write-off reason is a temperature record exceeding the limit, and the approval status is pending supplier confirmation. The draft sentence is: "The write-off approval for this batch of chilled pork has been completed, and the loss is borne by the supplier." The request to be judged is: use the draft sentence above as a citation-source example in internal training material, labelled as sourced from the shrinkage record and the inspection record.
Configuration and implementation checks
The table below is built around the hypothetical drill sample and lists documented settings or implementation checks relevant to this page's feature and to the store service and internal training task. The values are starting points for this hypothetical trial only, used for comparison with the actual fields in the sample, and do not represent official defaults.
| Configuration item | Starting point for this hypothetical trial | Reason and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Linked knowledge bases | Link only knowledge bases containing the concession contract, inspection record, and shrinkage record | Check whether the vector model identifiers of the knowledge bases match; exclude those that do not, and do not run cross-model retrieval |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | The sample contains number HYP-2024-031 and batch number P-20240506-01, so both semantic and keyword matching matter |
| Citation limit | Set to 2000 tokens as the starting point for this hypothetical trial | The sample material contains contract clauses and batch records and must hold complete fields; adjust after comparing with the actual length of the sample text |
| Minimum relevance | Set to 0.5 as the starting point for this hypothetical trial | Used to filter low-relevance fragments; compare with the score of the original fragment matching the draft sentence, and do not use it for permission filtering |
| Result rerank | Enabled | The sample involves several documents and needs a second ordering of candidates; the rerank score is used for filtering and does not replace manual checking |
| Question optimization | On | The draft sentence contains a reference, so the subject and object must be completed before retrieval |
Three common errors
- Reading "pending supplier confirmation" on the shrinkage record as completed approval. In the sample the shrinkage record's approval status is explicitly pending supplier confirmation, while the draft sentence says the write-off approval has been completed. The input is the original shrinkage record text, the comparison object is the approval status field, and the observable result is that the status value does not match the wording of the draft sentence.
- Extending "inspected" on the purchase inspection record to loss responsibility. In the sample the inspection record states only the inspector signature and the inspection status; it does not state that the loss is borne by the supplier. The input is the original inspection record text, the comparison object is the responsibility field, and the observable result is that this field is not stated and the claim is unsupported.
- Treating a retrieval hit as a basis for authorization. If the draft sentence is retrieved in the sample, that shows only a similarity between the sentence and knowledge base content; it does not show that write-off approval is complete or that responsibility has been assigned. The input is the retrieval output array, the comparison object is the shrinkage record approval status and the contract responsibility clause, and the observable result is that the retrieval result does not change the approval status field.
How to verify the setup
- Use the original shrinkage record text from the hypothetical drill sample as input and search the linked knowledge base for "batch P-20240506-01 write-off approval status". Compare the returned citation fragment with the approval status field in the original shrinkage record. If the returned fragment shows "pending supplier confirmation" while the draft sentence says the write-off approval has been completed, judge the draft sentence inconsistent with the source and either revise the draft sentence or supply evidence that approval was completed.
- Use the original inspection record text from the hypothetical drill sample as input and search for "batch P-20240506-01 loss responsibility". Compare whether the returned fragment states the party bearing responsibility. If the returned fragment contains only the inspector and the inspection status and no responsibility field, judge the responsibility wording in the draft sentence unsupported and keep the evidence gap open.
- Use the explicit paper input of an empty array
[]to check the downstream design. Compare how the downstream node is designed to behave when it receives an empty citation array, and confirm whether it treats this as content not retrieved. If the downstream design treats an empty array as an error termination, this conflicts with the statement that the knowledge base search node output length may be zero, and the downstream design needs adjustment. This check does not claim that a fictional-rule search will necessarily return an empty array.