Failure Modes of Flat Retrieval

① A chunk carries no context

X100 › Maintenance › Battery ✂ "… inspection interval: 6 months …" which model? which part?

the severed heading path was its identity

② Evidence is scattered

table: 6 months §2 caution: halve it in high heat they answer only together, yet travel apart

worse when the answer spans table, figure, and text

③ Ambiguity at corpus scale

X100 · battery inspection 6 months X200 · battery inspection 12 months X300 · battery inspection 3 months ?

hundreds of docs × hundreds of chunks · near-identical sentences compete

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