Amey-Thakur Citation grounding
An answer without citations asks the user to trust it. An answer with citations that do not support the claim is worse, because it looks verified. Grounding is the discipline of making the link real and checkable.
Method
- Cite at the claim, not at the end. A single reference at the bottom of a paragraph tells the reader nothing about which sentence came from where.
- Cite what was actually retrieved. The model must reference the passages it was given, and a citation to a document that was not in context is fabricated regardless of whether the document exists.
- Verify citations mechanically. Check that each cited identifier was in the provided context, which catches the most common fabrication cheaply (see agent-generate-and-verify).
- Make the citation openable. Deep link to the passage with enough location detail for the user to find it in the source (see chunking-strategies).
- Mark unsupported statements plainly. Where the model adds reasoning beyond the sources, that should be visibly distinct from what the documents state.
- Prefer refusal to unsourced assertion. When the context does not answer the question, saying so is correct behaviour rather than failure (see rag-evaluation).
- Keep quotes short and exact. A brief verbatim span is stronger evidence than a paraphrase and is checkable at a glance.
Boundaries
Citations show provenance, not correctness: a faithfully cited source can itself be wrong. Verification confirms the passage was present, not that it supports the claim, which needs a semantic check. Heavy citation harms readability, so density is a design decision.