Grounding Quality Dimensions
Citation presence, entailment, inference legitimacy, relevance, and viewpoint coverage must be evaluated separately in grounded agent outputs.
A citation-density score collapses distinct failure modes. Evaluate at least:
- whether each claim has a citation;
- whether the cited passage entails the sentence;
- whether the synthesis preserves the source's meaning;
- whether the inference legitimately connects evidence to the topic;
- whether the source is relevant; and
- whether the retrieved source set represents viewpoints neutrally.
A citation makes a claim traceable. It does not establish that the passage entails the wording, preserves its meaning, or licenses the inference drawn from it, and high citation density can coexist with a failure on any of these later checks. Audit each layer on its own. Never treat automated citation recall or entailment as a complete quality score. A system can score well on citation precision and recall while showing no gain in human-perceived verifiability. Combine these dimensions in research-agent evaluation, and inspect inferential-link failures separately from missing citations.
Sources
- Shao et al. (2024), full paper, pp. 1–27