> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.interpscout.org/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Terminology Base

> How terms are modeled, graded, highlighted, and searched across every course

Every course the Producer agent curates deposits its glossary into one shared store. It isn't a per-course word list — it's a cross-document base that gets thicker and more cross-referenced every time a new course is produced.

## The concept-variant model

A term isn't stored as a single zh↔en pair. It's stored as a **concept** — a canonical Chinese form, normalized so that simplified/traditional variants collapse to the same row — with one or more **term variants** attached to it, each tagged by language and a status: `preferred`, `admitted`, or `deprecated`. A concept can have several admitted English renderings while one is marked preferred; a deprecated variant stays in the database (so old occurrences still resolve) without being surfaced as current usage.

Every place a term actually appears in a course text is a separate **occurrence** row, linked back to its concept variant with the exact character span in both the Chinese and English paragraph. That's what makes hover-linkage and highlighting possible: the reader isn't guessing where a term is on the page, it's rendering spans that were recorded at production time.

## Official-tier grading

Not every rendering in the base carries the same authority, and InterpScout doesn't pretend otherwise. Two places do the grading work:

* **During course production**, the adversarial glossary reviewer sub-agent's job includes flagging renderings that are plausible paraphrases but not the established, official form — the Producer agent is expected to verify uncertain renderings with a web search rather than write from memory.
* **In briefings**, every entry in the bilingual term table carries an explicit two-column verdict: a grading column (official vs. reference) and a source column. A rendering is only marked official if it was actually found in an authoritative bilingual source — a government white paper, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs bilingual transcript, a UN parallel text. Anything the agent can't source that way is labeled reference, honestly, rather than upgraded on confidence alone.

## Search: literal, phonetic, and semantic, fused

Searching the terminology base runs three matching strategies against the same query and merges the results:

* **Literal substring matching** on Chinese and English text — fast, exact, and the primary path for most queries.
* **Pinyin matching**, so a query typed in pinyin still reaches the Chinese term it's meant to find.
* **Semantic vector search** over term embeddings, for queries that don't share surface text with the term they're looking for.

Results from these paths are fused with reciprocal rank fusion and then reranked, so a query gets one ranked list rather than three disconnected ones. Search results are term hits, not course listings — searching `新质生产力` returns the term itself, its rendering, and its grading, ranked by relevance, not a list of courses that happen to mention it.

## Reading a term in context

In the parallel reader, a highlighted term is a live link into this model, not decoration:

<Steps>
  <Step title="Hover">
    Hovering a highlighted term on one side of the parallel text highlights its counterpart on the other side — the zh↔en linkage is real, driven by the recorded span, not a heuristic guess at alignment.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Double-click">
    Double-clicking a term jumps to that course's own glossary table, anchored at the row for that term, showing its graded rendering and source. There is no popover card floating over the text — the glossary lives at the bottom of the page as a real, readable table, and double-click scrolls you to the right row in it.
  </Step>
</Steps>

<Note>
  Grading and the concept-variant model are course-terminology-base concepts. Briefing term tables are meeting-specific by design — their terms are graded the same way but stay scoped to that briefing rather than merging into the long-lived cross-document base, since a one-off meeting term isn't necessarily a durable asset for the glossary.
</Note>