What the documents look like
Reverse returned-goods inspection at the warehouse handles returned parcels and item grades. It does not handle outbound picking for new orders. The working materials are the return inbound note, inspection photographs, the grade decision table, and the resale listing sheet. These arrive from the WMS returns module, platform after-sales, carrier returns, and the inspection bench. Each returned unit is scanned, its condition judged, and a decision made between resale and disposal. The materials update per item and per day.
For cross-border material and multilingual retrieval, a Chinese question may need to match an English knowledge point. Semantic retrieval carries cross-language matching, and that ability depends on how the vector model was trained. Inspection photographs are image material. Whether an image can be retrieved depends on whether an index was built at ingestion time, in addition to whether an image was uploaded at search time.
Constraints at the document chunking step
The return inbound note carries the return number, item number, returned quantity, and carrier field. The grade decision table carries grade codes and decision conditions. The resale listing sheet carries listing status. At chunking time, a condition statement and the content it constrains need to stay inside the same data segment, so that a grade condition and its conclusion are not split into separate chunks. One group of source data can map to multiple vectors. After several vectors are added for one longer text, retrieval of any one of those vectors recalls that data.
Full-text retrieval suits exact queries such as numbers, models, and proper nouns. Semantic retrieval suits natural-language phrasing. Hybrid retrieval uses both recall paths and merges the results through RRF. A rerank model performs a second ordering of candidate text, and its score falls in the 0-1 range. The minimum relevance value takes effect only under semantic retrieval or when result reranking is used. It is a filter threshold and does not perform permission or entity isolation.
Hypothetical drill sample: a batch of returns at an after-sales warehouse. The return inbound note states "Return number RT-2024-0317, item number SKU-8842, returned quantity 6 units, carrier line A." The grade decision table states "Surface damage with missing accessories, graded C, not permitted for relisting." Two inspection photographs exist. The resale listing sheet has not been filled in. The draft sentence awaiting judgment is "The 6 units in this batch have completed inspection, grade C, relisting can be arranged." The scope of comparison is limited to the materials matching that return number and item number. The authorization boundary is the inspector and the inventory administrator. Refund and disposal decisions fall outside this page.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Setting or check on this page | Basis and explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Numbers and item codes go through full-text recall, natural-language phrasing goes through semantic recall, and the two paths merge through RRF |
| Reference cap | Hypothetical drill starting point 3000 tokens | This value is a starting point for this drill, used for comparison against observed single-chunk length; it is not an official default |
| Minimum relevance | Hypothetical drill starting point 0.4 | Takes effect only under semantic retrieval or result reranking; compared against observed rerank scores |
| Chunking check | Grade condition and conclusion kept in the same chunk | Checked segment by segment against the grade decision table structure, so a condition and the content it constrains are not separated |
| Image index | Check whether an image index was generated at ingestion | Image-to-image results depend on whether the vector model supports image input and on the ingestion-time index |
| Post-update review | Check actual training and index state | A successful upload does not mean retrieval has already updated |
Three common errors
- Chunking splits a grade condition from its conclusion. The grade decision table text "Surface damage with missing accessories, graded C, not permitted for relisting" is cut into two chunks, retrieval recalls only "graded C," and the draft sentence is written as "relisting can be arranged," leaving out the constraint "not permitted for relisting."
- A retrieval hit is treated as authorization. Recalling the draft sentence "relisting can be arranged" only means the content is relevant to the question. It does not mean the inspector has received listing approval, and it does not mean the resale listing sheet has been filled in.
- An image that was not recalled is attributed directly to search parameters. Whether an image can be retrieved depends on whether an image index was built at ingestion and on model capability. Adjusting parameters before checking index state leaves the cause unidentified.
How to verify the setup
- Enter the return inbound note text "Return number RT-2024-0317, item number SKU-8842, returned quantity 6 units, carrier line A," then search separately with the item number SKU-8842 and with the natural-language question "how many units are in this returned batch." Compare whether the recalled content contains the same group of source data. If the number query does not match while the natural-language query does, record that observation without declaring a system fault.
- Enter the grade decision table text "Surface damage with missing accessories, graded C, not permitted for relisting," and compare whether the recalled chunk contains both the decision condition and "not permitted for relisting." If only "graded C" is recalled, record the split-chunk phenomenon.
- Enter the draft sentence "The 6 units in this batch have completed inspection, grade C, relisting can be arranged," and compare it against the grade decision table text. The source text states relisting is not permitted, while the draft sentence states relisting can be arranged. The same field holds mutually exclusive values, so this is judged a contradiction. The resale listing sheet has not been filled in, so listing status is unsupported and remains pending verification. To check downstream design with an empty result, use the clearly labelled paper input [] and record what is returned, without presuming that a fictional rule must return an empty result.