Why do source documents matter before embeddings?
Strong answer: embeddings can only search what the corpus contains. If sources are stale, unauthorized, or low quality, retrieval quality starts broken.
Interview Questions: Source Documents
Use these to explain source governance like a production RAG engineer.
What metadata should every source carry?
Strong answer: source id, owner, authority, version, effective date, access level, format, source URI, section/page, and freshness rule.
Why are PDFs risky?
Strong answer: extraction can lose reading order, tables, page references, OCR quality, headers, and footnotes.
How would you handle draft documents?
Strong answer: quarantine or mark them as non-authoritative; do not let drafts compete with approved sources for policy answers.
Why is synthetic data useful?
Strong answer: it enables public learning with realistic structure and failure modes without exposing private data.
How do structured sources differ from unstructured sources?
Strong answer: structured sources have schema and exact values; unstructured sources need extraction, hierarchy preservation, and context reconstruction.
What is source authority?
Strong answer: the trust level or precedence of a source, used to decide which document wins when sources conflict.
What is a source registry?
Strong answer: an inventory of sources with governance metadata and readiness status for ingestion.