Build a Tiny Citation Gate Before Trusting RAG Answers

Short summary

A RAG answer can cite a real document and still make an unsupported claim. The article proposes a deterministic citation gate that splits answers into atomic claims, checks that cited sources exist, and verifies required terms appear in the cited text before any semantic entailment model is applied. This simple term-matching gate catches missing references and obvious mismatches while remaining inspectable, serving as a useful first test before graduating to an entailment model evaluated on precision and recall separately.

• •Build a deterministic gate first: check source existence and required-term presence before semantic reasoning
• •Split answers into atomic claims with one citation each; reject citations to spans not actually retrieved
• •Measure precision and recall separately; a gate that blocks everything has no product value

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