Grounded Answering and Claim Support
Grounded generation requires factual claims to be supported by retrieved evidence. A citation at the end is not enough if it does not support the associated claim. Separate direct source statements from synthesis and inference; answer supported parts and identify missing evidence. Model confidence language is not automatically calibrated.
Grounding depends on retrieval, context construction, prompt design, citation validation, and evaluation. Abstention is a correct behavior when the corpus does not support an answer.
Implementation example
{
"claim":"The trial lasts 30 days",
"evidence":[{"sourceId":"pricing-policy-v5","chunkId":"pricing-policy-v5:12"}]
}💡 A claim-to-evidence map can support citation checks; the application should verify source IDs.
Key Takeaways
- Inspect the relevant pipeline stage instead of guessing.
- Preserve source provenance, versions, and access scope.
- Measure quality on representative queries.
Knowledge Check
What makes an answer grounded?