Building the answer

Concept 9.1

Context selection, packing and citations

Turning ranked chunks into a prompt: how many, in what order, labelled how, and how to make every claim point at a numbered source. With measured context sizes and a citation check.

Concept 9.2

Grounding prompts and abstention

Retrieval always returns something, even for questions the documents cannot answer. A grounding prompt tells the model to answer only from the sources and to say when it cannot, and a test set checks that it does.

Concept 9.3

Lost in the middle and context management

Models use the start and end of a long context better than the middle. Where our answers land in the context, and how ordering, short contexts and trimmed history keep the answer where the model looks.

Concept 9.4

Conflicts, staleness and freshness rules

When two sources disagree, or an old version sits next to the current one, the model needs rules. On our corpus 5 of 8 version questions had an outdated version in the top 3.

Concept 9.5

Hallucination checks and answer verification

Check an answer after it is written: are its numbers, codes and dates in the cited sources? A simple number check passed 38 of 39 real answers on our corpus and caught 28 of 39 answers with one number changed.

Concept 9.6

Conversational RAG, answer UX and RAG APIs

Follow-up questions, showing sources, collecting feedback and returning structured answers. We searched 7 follow-ups three ways: as typed, glued to the previous question, and rewritten.