Review queue

A review queue is where a resolver puts the records it would not decide, so that a person can settle them. Fellegi and Sunter called it clerical review; the modern versions are stewardship consoles and match-review workbenches. The idea is unchanged: some pairs cannot be decided by rule or by score, and the right destination for them is a person with the evidence in front of them rather than a threshold nudged until the queue empties.

Three properties separate a working queue from a backlog. Each item must carry the evidence that produced it — the shortlist, the features that fired, the sources cited — so a reviewer is judging rather than researching. The verdict must be attributable to a named reviewer, because an unattributable approval is a workflow step and not a control. And the verdicts must feed back as labels, or the queue is a cost centre that teaches the system nothing.

The accounting has to keep the two populations apart. A merge a human approved is not evidence about the automated system, and folding reviewer-approved merges into an automated accuracy figure inflates it silently.

Entity Bind writes every abstention to the review queue with its shortlist and a review id, refuses a verdict that does not name an accountable reviewer, records the credential and surface that applied it, and excludes reviewer-approved merges from the automated population every published accuracy figure is measured over. Settling an item requires a separately issued review credential: a resolve credential may read the queue and cannot settle anything, which is what stops an agent asserting whose judgement a merge represents.