Traversal Stage 1: Selecting Candidate Documents
inputs
color code ·
the query
·
doc cards
·
pass
Q.
X100 battery
inspection interval?
doc cards
title + heading paths
every document · × hundreds
score(doc, q)
BM25
word overlap
→ 0.88
dense emb.
meaning close
→ 0.94
α⊕
0.92
α : 1−α
both min-max normalized before the blend
every doc scored, then ranked
X100 Manual · "…5.3
Battery
…"
0.92
Service Guide · "…
battery
handling…"
0.71
cutoff · these pass ✓
X200 Manual · similar, wrong model
0.55
Install Guide · no battery at all
0.18
the query word "battery" meets the heading path directly · structure boosts the score
output
only a few pass
✓
X100 Manual
✓
Service Guide
thousands → a few
Thousands → a few ·
the cheapest computation prunes the largest space
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