Abstention

An abstention is a returned decision not to decide: the system declines to bind, says why, and hands back the evidence it has rather than a guess dressed as an answer. It is a distinct return shape rather than a low-confidence match, and it is not a null, because a null tells the caller nothing about what would have helped. Almost every other entity resolver returns its best candidate with a similarity score instead, and leaves the caller to work out what to do with a 0.71.

Getting this right is mostly about what travels with the refusal. A useful abstention carries the ranked shortlist so a human can settle it in seconds, a typed reason distinguishing 'nothing found' from 'two candidates I cannot separate' from 'a dependency was unavailable', the specific column that would have decided it, and an identifier that reopens the whole decision later.

Abstention is also a commercial position. On Entity Bind an abstention costs zero credits at every stage, including the stages that spent the most getting there, so the incentive to guess is removed from the pricing as well as from the code. It is the behaviour the weakest input shape depends on: on the 317-company recording of 2026-08-29, truncated names resolved at 58.10% (61/105) — 44 of 105 come back as an abstention with a shortlist, which is the correct answer for a name whose missing tokens were the discriminating ones.

The blended rate across input shapes is 95.75%, and it should be read with its own warning: A historical 2026-08-29 blend across six input shapes in a preloaded UK catalogue. Its value depends on that mix: truncated names measured 58.10% while the blend measured 95.75%. Neither establishes the current minimum-input target.