Learning path · Production RAG · 52
Citation and Grounding
Requiring answers to quote or link retrieved evidence—and refusing when support is insufficient.
Why it matters
- Trust and compliance depend on traceable sources.
- Reduces undetected hallucination in enterprise QA.
- UX must show citations users can verify.
Key ideas
- Inline citations
- Abstention
- Evidence spans
Top resources
- 01PaperLewis et al.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP
Why this resource. Grounding is why RAG exists; citations are the audit trail.
Covers in this concept
- evidence
- generation
- 02ArticleAnthropic
Contextual retrieval
Why this resource. How to keep retrieved spans attributable in the prompt.
Covers in this concept
- citations
- context
Grounding policies instruct the model to tie claims to chunk IDs or URLs, use direct quotes for numbers, and say "I don't know" when retrieval misses. Validate automatically: NLI models or LLM judges compare answers to passages. User interfaces should surface citations prominently—not footnotes users never expand. Grounding is a product requirement, not a prompt afterthought. Train support staff to click citations during QA shifts; broken anchors erode trust faster than occasional wrong answers.
Updated 2026-08-09 · Full learning path