Glossary · Measurement

False bind

A false bind is Entity Bind's name for the error it treats as unacceptable: a record attached to the wrong company entity and returned as a decided match.
How to read this

The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. Filed under measurement.

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the full definition

What false bind means

A false bind is a submitted record attached to an existing entity that is not the company the record describes, and returned as a match rather than as an abstention or a shortlist. It is narrower than 'false positive', and it is the error a caller cannot detect, because the answer arrives with the same shape and the same confidence field as a correct one.

The design consequence is that the system prefers under-merging everywhere the two conflict: the adjudication stage is instructed to prefer under-merge, conflicting strong identifiers are a decisive non-match rather than a tie-break, and the clustering step refuses transitive merges across a contradiction. Each of those choices costs coverage, and the coverage they cost is visible in the per-tier resolution rates.

The measured result on the live-adjudicated recording of 2026-08-29 is 0 false binds. Zero wrong bindings were observed across the historical six-shape recording and the separate domain fixture. Observed correctness was 1.0000 on accepted outcomes; this does not guarantee an error-free new workload.

There is an adversarial version of the same test, in which the context supplied alongside the name is wrong. In the historical 50-record wrong-town fixture, 72% resolved and zero wrong bindings were observed. This is a measured adversarial sample, not a guarantee for every misleading description. That is the behaviour the whole cascade is built to produce: bad evidence should degrade an answer into an abstention, never into a confident wrong one. Historical results on an internal UK fixture with a preloaded catalogue. The September 5 replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot establish current calibration. No independent customer holdout or global coverage claim.

see also

The terms next to this one

Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one.

False positive

A false positive in entity resolution is a pair of records asserted to be the same entity when they are not — the error class that corrupts data rather than merely leaving it untidy.

Abstention

An abstention is a first-class 'we do not know' returned instead of a match: the record comes back unresolved, with a ranked shortlist, a typed reason and the column that would have decided it.

Confidence floor

A confidence floor is the score below which a system refuses to return a match at all, expressed as an acceptance contract rather than as a promise about accuracy.

Over-merge

An over-merge is a cluster containing records from more than one real entity — the failure that turns two customers, two suppliers or two counterparties into one.

Decision receipt

A decision receipt is the durable, retrievable record of why a particular match was made — the features, the probability, the thresholds in force, the sources cited and the version of the pipeline that decided — addressable by an identifier returned with the answer.

evidence basis

Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.

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