jouleclaw-compose: attribute a claim to its most authoritative citation #344
2026-10-19
jouleclaw-compose: attribute a claim to its most authoritative citation
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`compose_verified_answer` built each segment's `ClaimAttribution` from
ds.cited_item_ids.iter().filter_map(resolve).next()
under a comment reading "Source URI from the most authoritative cited item".
`.next()` is the first cited id that happens to resolve, in whatever order the
ids were listed — a stated selection criterion the code did not perform.
Authority tier 1 is `AuthorityTier::Primary` and 4 is `Community`, so the most
authoritative cited item is the **minimum** tier. A segment citing a forum post
before a peer-reviewed source was therefore attributed to the forum post, and
the whole attribution rides on that one choice: `retrieval_source_uri`,
`retrieval_timestamp` and `retrieval_axes` all come from it. Selection is now
`min_by_key` on the tier, with ties broken on `item_id` so the result is
reproducible rather than a function of citation order.
A second problem sat in the same expression. `filter_map` drops a cited id that
matches no retrieved item **silently**, so a segment whose citations all dangle
came out with the ids still attached and an all-`None` attribution, with
nothing anywhere stating why. A reader sees citations and no source. Dangling
citations are now counted and reported as a caveat, using the mechanism the
function already uses for dropped segments. This is the honest shape of the
problem the sweep called "citation laundering": the citations are not read back
as provenance, and the gap was invisible.
Three tests, each pinning one property, every one of them discriminating on
*order* rather than on a single arrangement:
- the same two items, tier 1 and tier 4, cited both ways round, must attribute
to the tier-1 source both times;
- two items of **equal** authority, cited both ways round, must resolve the
same way — the tie-break is the only thing that makes this true, and it is
the only test that catches its removal;
- a segment with one real and one dangling citation reports the dangling one
and still attributes from the real one; a segment where every citation
dangles has no attribution at all, which is when saying so matters most.
The sweep's own description of this finding was wrong in its specifics —
`cited_item_ids` is read in three places, and there is no `jouleclaw-diagnose`
crate — but reading the code to check surfaced the real defect beside it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>