What the documents look like
A brand concession inside a shopping mall differs from a brand-operated street store in one structural way: the mall collects payment centrally and settles on a concession-fee basis. That arrangement shapes the four document types this page covers. The joint-operation concession contract originates from the signing process between brand retail and mall operations. The mall activity letter originates from mall operations. Sales receipts originate from the mall POS. The monthly settlement statement originates from the reconciliation between the finance system and the brand ERP.
Daily and monthly update rhythms mean retrieval must be bounded by the time range of the material. Statements from different months cannot be merged into one recall. In an operations handover, the retrieval target is permission and status evidence: the authorization scope stated in a contract, the execution requirements stated in an activity letter, the confirmation status stated in a settlement statement. The knowledge base search node links one or more knowledge bases that use the same vector model, and outputs cited content as an array whose length may be zero. Retrieval does not decide whether a document has been signed or a request has been approved. Those states require reading the source text or confirming them separately.
Constraints at the retrieval step
Retrieval returns text fragments, not permission determinations. Semantic search depends on vector distance, full-text search depends on keyword hits, hybrid search merges the two paths through RRF, and result reranking applies a ReRank model for a second ordering. The minimum relevance score takes effect only in semantic search or when result reranking is used; it is a filtering threshold and does not perform permission or entity isolation. The citation limit is measured in tokens and controls the maximum amount of content cited per search.
Hypothetical paper exercise. Source text available for checking: Article 3 of a joint-operation concession contract between a brand and a mall states that "adjustments to the concession's staff by Party B require prior written consent from Party A's operations department." A mall activity letter states that "the registration deadline for this activity is April 20; late registration is treated as non-participation." A monthly settlement statement states that "the concession fee for this period has been confirmed and awaits the brand's sealed return copy." One draft sentence to be assessed: "The concession store manager has obtained written mall consent and may adjust concession staff independently." The information needed for the judgment: the contract requires written consent from Party A's operations department, and the phrase "has obtained" in the draft requires a corresponding written consent document. No such written consent document appears in the current material, so the draft sentence remains unsupported.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical trial starting point for this page | Reason for the choice and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Linked knowledge bases | Link only the knowledge base holding this concession's contract and activity letters | Check each base's vector model identifier first, exclude bases with different models, and do not link across models |
| Search mode | Hybrid search | Contract clauses contain numbers and proper nouns, activity letters contain natural-language requirements; compare semantic, full-text and hybrid results against the test question |
| Citation limit | Set, for this hypothetical trial, to the token volume needed to cover one complete contract clause paragraph | Test with materials of different lengths to see whether content stays complete, then adjust the value |
| Minimum relevance score | Set, for this hypothetical trial, to a middle value | Label relevant and irrelevant samples first, then compare whether irrelevant fragments are filtered at different values |
| Question optimization | Enabled | Used for coreference resolution and question expansion; compare the original question with the optimized question and check whether the subject was altered |
| Result reranking | Enabled according to the setting | The rerank score can be used for filtering; compare ordering stability against the vector score |
Three common errors
- Treating a retrieval hit as authorization confirmation. The input is the retrieved contract clause fragment; the comparison object is the phrase "has obtained written consent" in the draft sentence; the observable result is whether the fragment states a consent subject and a consent object. A retrieval hit does not produce an authorization state.
- Treating a pending request as approved. The input is the registration deadline in the activity letter; the comparison object is the phrase "has participated in the activity" in the draft sentence; the observable result is whether a registration confirmation record exists in the material. A deadline does not show that registration was completed.
- Linking knowledge bases that use different vector models. The input is each knowledge base's vector model identifier; the comparison object is the node's same-vector-model condition; the observable result is that bases with mismatched identifiers are excluded. Linking them together does not produce comparable retrieval results.
How to verify the setup
- Input the contract source text and the draft sentence from the hypothetical exercise; compare the subject and status of "has obtained written mall consent" in the draft against "requires prior written consent from Party A's operations department" in the source. The observable result is that, when the source does not state that written consent document, the judgment is unsupported. The expectation is that the evidence gap is preserved; no actual test is claimed.
- Input the activity letter source text and the draft sentence from the hypothetical exercise; compare the registration deadline against a registration confirmation record. The observable result is that, when no registration confirmation record exists in the material, the judgment is pending verification. The deadline must not be interpreted as completed registration.
- Input each knowledge base's vector model identifier and compare it against the node's linking condition. The observable result is that bases with mismatched identifiers are excluded. If retrieval returns an empty array, check the downstream design against the explicit paper input []; do not claim that a hypothetical rule necessarily returns [].