AI-assisted practical guide. Examples are hypothetical; proposed workflows are editorial suggestions.
A search assistant should be tested on questions whose answers are absent from its source collection. Otherwise a trial may reward fluent guessing without revealing whether the system recognizes its evidence boundary.
Include missing and ambiguous cases
Build a small packet containing answerable questions, questions requiring unavailable information, and questions with more than one plausible interpretation. Write the expected handling before seeing the outputs.
Require references to supplied material for factual answers. A reference should support the associated claim, not merely mention the same topic.
Inspect a hypothetical failure
Imagine the collection includes last year's event details but no current venue. A question about the next event should not produce the old venue as a confirmed current answer. The assistant should identify the gap or ask for clarification, depending on the workflow.
Check whether an answer mixes supported facts with an unsupported final sentence. Partial grounding does not validate the whole response.
Report the trial accurately
Keep questions, source versions, outputs, and review notes. Evaluate appropriate abstention as well as successful answers. Do not turn a small packet into a universal reliability score. The trial should reveal which evidence boundaries the workflow handles and where a human check or source refresh remains necessary before the answer can be used.