ORIGINAL COMPANY-CONTEXT PRACTICE
Resolve research compound mentions without guessing an identity
Original practice scenario: A hypothetical research assistant links compound names in documents to a reviewed internal catalog. Abbreviations and development codes are reused. How should matching and evaluation work?
Written for independent practice using company context; this is not a verified question from a company interview.
A REASONED APPROACH
Model answer.
Use contextual candidate generation followed by an explicit identity decision, including an unresolved outcome. A familiar-looking abbreviation is not reliable evidence of one compound across every document.
Work through it
- Maintain versioned aliases, catalog identifiers and context such as study or document date, preserving original mentions and candidate evidence.
- Evaluate exact and contextual matching against independently reviewed examples, separating ambiguous names, obsolete aliases and truly unseen compounds.
- Require the assistant to expose the chosen catalog identity and source support, abstaining or requesting review when competing candidates remain plausible.
Tradeoffs to discuss
- Broad alias matching improves recall but increases false links; narrow identifiers are precise while missing informal research language.
Common pitfalls
- Do not evaluate on duplicate passages from the same document family used for training.
- A correct entity link does not establish that a generated scientific or medical statement about the compound is supported.