Why Conflicts Are Inevitable
In any organization with 1,000+ documents — legal, medical, financial, compliance, or technical — conflicts are guaranteed. Policies get updated but reference guides lag behind. Regional variations exist but aren't clearly scoped. Newer versions override older ones — but both remain indexed.
Without conflict detection, your RAG system picks one document at random (based on embedding similarity) and gives a confident wrong answer.
A doctor asks "What's the dosage for Drug X with renal impairment?" Two clinical guidelines disagree. A loan officer asks "What's the approval threshold?" Two policy versions conflict. The system must handle this — automatically.
Conflict Detection Architecture
Four Types of Conflicts
- Factual Contradiction — "Leave is 16 weeks" vs "Leave is 12 weeks" (High severity)
- Procedural Conflict — "Submit via portal" vs "Submit via email" (Medium)
- Staleness Gap — Guide references outdated policy version (Medium)
- Scope Ambiguity — Global vs regional rules unclear (Low)
Example Conflict
"Parental leave entitlement is 16 weeks for all eligible employees, effective January 2025."
"Employees are entitled to 12 weeks of parental leave per the global framework."
Authority Hierarchy
When documents conflict, three deterministic rules resolve 90% of cases:
#1 Regional primary document (user's geography, latest)
#2 Global primary document (latest version)
#3 Regional reference/guide
#4 Global reference/guide
#5 Older version of anything
Rules:
• Primary ALWAYS beats reference (regardless of date)
• Regional ALWAYS beats global (for that region)
• Newer ALWAYS beats older (same document family)Cost & Scale
Initial full scan (1,400 docs): ~$25-40, 2-3 hours
Per new document (incremental): ~$0.05, 30-90 seconds
Query-time lookup: ~10ms (indexed table)
False positive rate: <3% (with claim extraction)Domain Applications
- Healthcare: Drug interaction guidelines from different specialist bodies
- Legal: Overlapping regulations across jurisdictions
- Finance: Risk thresholds from different policy vintages
- Manufacturing: Safety procedures updated at different plant levels
Takeaway
Detect early (ingestion time). Classify precisely (4 types). Resolve deterministically (hierarchy rules). Handle gracefully at runtime (suppress losers, surface ambiguity). Update incrementally (don't re-scan everything on each change).