What the documents look like
Convenience-store fresh food is ordered by the store at high frequency against short shelf life. Unlike a hypermarket fresh counter run as a joint-operation concession, the store places its own replenishment orders and does not settle through a concession revenue split. The working materials are the fresh-food order form, the damage/loss report, the near-expiry handling sheet and the cold-chain temperature log. These are produced from POS sales, the headquarters ordering system, store inventory and cold-chain temperature records, and they move between store manager, fresh-food buyer and regional supervisor during shift handover.
Citation tracing for operations handover addresses one question: when a handover material contains a stated conclusion or a request, can that sentence be traced to a specific document, and what authorization state does that document carry. Retrieval returns candidate source text. It does not decide permissions.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
The knowledge base search node can be linked to one or more knowledge bases that share the same vector model, and it outputs citations as an array whose length may be zero. A zero-length array still lets that output branch run through. This matters for handover: an empty citation array is a valid output, not a termination.
The minimum relevance value is a filter threshold and takes effect only under semantic retrieval or result re-ranking. It is not a subject, store or authorization filter. Hybrid retrieval merges multiple retrieval paths through RRF, and re-ranking produces a 0-1 score used for filtering. Neither changes the authorization facts of the source text. The citation token limit is measured in tokens and is unrelated to the thinking budget, which is a model reasoning allowance.
Hypothetical drill sample. Material A is: "8 October, 14:00-22:00 shift fresh-food order form, store number S-102, orderer Li, status is awaiting regional supervisor review." Material B is: "8 October near-expiry handling sheet, store number S-102, handler Li, status: registered, damage report not submitted." The draft sentence to be judged is: "Store S-102 completed review of its 8 October fresh-food order and submitted the damage report." The draft sentence touches two fields. Material A shows awaiting review. Material B shows the damage report not submitted.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration or check item | Hypothetical trial starting point for this page | Reason and comparison object |
|---|---|---|
| Linked knowledge bases | Select only fresh-food policy bases with a matching vector model identifier | Compared with a base whose vector model identifier differs; mismatched bases are excluded and no cross-model retrieval is run |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Compared with semantic retrieval alone; numbered and coded fields rely more on full-text recall |
| Minimum relevance | Set 0.5 as a starting point | Compared with 0.3; observe whether candidate source text covers Materials A and B |
| Citation limit | Set 2000 tokens as a starting point | Compared with 1000 tokens; confirm both materials enter the citation in full |
| Result re-ranking | Enabled as configured | Compared with the disabled state; observe whether the re-rank score changes candidate order |
| Citation handoff | Pass the citation array to the answering step for item-by-item checking | Compared with reading only the answer text; confirm the answer sentence can be traced back to source text |
Three common errors
- Treating Material A's "awaiting regional supervisor review" as a completed review. Input is the Material A source text; the compared field is status; the observable result is that "awaiting review" and the draft sentence's "completed review" are inconsistent.
- Treating Material B's "damage report not submitted" as a submitted damage report. Input is the Material B source text; the compared field is damage-report status; the observable result is that "not submitted" and the draft sentence's "submitted" are inconsistent.
- Treating a retrieval hit on Material A as proof that Li holds review authority. Input is the retrieval output citation array; the comparison object is an authorization record; the observable result is that the citation content contains no authorization field, so the permission remains unverified.
How to verify the setup
- Input the Material A source text together with the draft sentence, compare the status field values, and observe that "awaiting review" and "completed review" are mutually exclusive. The draft sentence is not supported.
- Input the Material B source text together with the draft sentence, compare the damage-report status field, and observe that "damage report not submitted" and "submitted" are mutually exclusive. The draft sentence is not supported.
- Input a paper citation array
[]and check the downstream handoff design, comparing whether the downstream step still runs. The observed result is that the branch runs through with no citation content. This does not assert that a fabricated-rule search necessarily returns an empty array.
All three judgments keep their evidence gaps open. Whether review was completed, whether the damage report was submitted, and whether Li holds the operating permission each require a further material carrying a signature or effective status. Retrieval and forms do not constitute authorization or execution.
The linked knowledge base check covers both the selected bases and the material version, and only bases sharing the same vector model may be linked together. The citation output check covers the array output and its permitted zero length. The citation handoff check covers whether retrieval output reaches the answering step for item-by-item comparison. The citation display check uses a traceable sample to compare source-text display, and does not substitute reasoning traces or fluent answers for source evidence. The material-currency check tests sources against the current and historical document versions, and whether a citation is adopted still depends on review of the effective version.