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10 · Citing sources

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Search and Retrieval, lesson 10

Citing sources

Make every claim point to the passage it came from.

"Answering from documents": a prompt with numbered passages, and an answer built from them. This lesson makes every claim point to the passage it came from.

Part 1. An answer you can check

Two answers to "How long do enterprise customers have to get a refund?" The first: "60 days, pro-rated." The second: "60 days [1], and the refund is pro-rated by unused months [2]." with [1] and [2] linking to the handbook passages.

Both are correct. Only the second lets the reader check it in a few seconds, and lets a reviewer see which passage each fact came from when something goes wrong.

Citation

A marker in the answer that points to the source passage a claim came from. Attribution is the general idea: every claim can be traced to a source.

Your turn

Which is the strongest reason to make a support bot cite its sources?

Citations don't make the model right. They make it checkable. A claim citing the wrong passage points to a retrieval or generation bug, and a claim with no possible citation is a red flag.

Part 2. Asking for citations

Keep going with Pro

You've done the first part. Pro opens the rest of this lesson, and every other one.

Still to come
  1. Asking for citations
  2. A citation can still be wrong
  3. "The sources don't say"
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Next lessonChecking answers against sourcesTest whether each answer is supported by what was retrieved. Start lesson 11

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