What the documents look like
Brand concession counters inside shopping malls settle sales through the mall's unified cashier and a concession-fee arrangement. Sales records originate from the mall POS, while the brand ERP, mall membership activity records and the finance system each keep their own version of the same events. The daily documents in this setting are the concession-fee contract, mall activity letters, sales receipts and the monthly settlement statement. Daily and monthly updates coexist, and reconciling mall sales, joining mall activities and processing concession fees are the time-consuming steps. These features mean that citation tracing during operations handover has to separate mall-side evidence from brand-side records, and mark the origin, version and current status of each material one by one.
The eight-dimensional brief describes this category, not a specific customer. Where the brief is uncertain, this page keeps the corresponding statement conditional.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
The knowledge base search node can associate one or more knowledge bases that use the same vector model, and outputs cited content as an array whose length may be zero. After retrieval results are passed to the answering step, the answer and the cited source text need to be checked line by line. Retrieval and citation do not constitute authorization: a retrieved concession-fee contract does not mean that contract has taken effect or that handover has been authorized.
Hypothetical paper exercise sample: the source text reads, "Party A, the mall, and Party B, the brand, signed a concession-fee contract, contract number H-001, signing date 1 March 2025, concession rate calculated at eighteen percent of the monthly sales amount, contract term from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026." A separate mall activity letter, number A-007, states, "The activity period runs from 1 May 2025 to 5 May 2025, and the counter must submit a participation confirmation before 25 April." The draft sentence to be judged is: "Contract H-001 has taken effect, activity A-007 has confirmed participation, handover can proceed." This sentence merges signing, issuance of the activity letter and confirmed participation into a single status, and lacks a confirmation receipt and an effectiveness record, so it is unsupported.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting point for this exercise | Reason and comparison object |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Select the knowledge base that stores concession-fee contracts and activity letters | Verify that the vector model identifiers of each base match before associating them together |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Contract numbers and activity letter numbers are exact queries, compared with semantic retrieval |
| Citation limit | Set to 3000 tokens | Starting point for this exercise, adjusted after comparing with the length of settlement statement fragments |
| Minimum relevance | Set to 0.4 | Starting point for this exercise, compared with unfiltered results |
| Result reranking | Enabled | Secondary ordering when candidates are numerous, compared with unranked results |
| Cited content output | Passed to the answering step | Check the answer and cited source text line by line |
These values are hypothetical starting points for the paper exercise, not official defaults. The relevance score is a filtering threshold, not a category, entity or permission filter, and it does not exclude unrelated businesses or unauthorized records. Retrieval is not authorization.
Three common errors
- Treating a retrieval hit as completed authorization. The input is a contract fragment returned by retrieval; the comparison object is the contract's signing status and effectiveness conditions; the observable result is that the fragment exists but there is no effectiveness record, so the claim is unsupported.
- Treating the issuance of an activity letter as confirmed participation. The input is the original text of activity letter A-007; the comparison object is a confirmation receipt; the observable result is that the letter states a submission deadline but there is no receipt, so the status remains pending verification.
- Associating knowledge bases that use different vector models. The input is the vector model identifiers of two knowledge bases; the comparison object is whether the identifiers match; the observable result is that different identifiers lead to exclusion, and no cross-model retrieval is performed.
How to verify the setup
- Input the original text of contract H-001 from the hypothetical sample together with the draft sentence; compare the "has taken effect" claim in the draft sentence with the original text, which only states a signing date; the observable result is that the original text contains no effectiveness clause, so the draft sentence is unsupported.
- Input the original text of activity letter A-007 together with the draft sentence; compare "has confirmed participation" with the original text, which only states a submission deadline; the observable result is that there is no confirmation receipt, so the status is pending verification.
- Input an empty citation array []; compare whether the downstream answering design handles a zero-length output; the observable result is that the downstream can accept the empty array without error, confirming that the chain runs through. This paper check does not claim that a fictional rule-based retrieval will always return an empty array.
A pending request is not approval, an offered option is not execution, and an unsigned termination is not a completed termination. Where a document field is not provided, it remains unknown.