How citations and validation work

Every factual claim in a FedGrade output — Brief paragraph, Forecast rationale, Network edge — is paired with a verbatim substring of a public source. This page explains the badge you see on each claim and what "insufficient evidence" actually means.

The validation pipeline

After synthesis but before delivery, the citation validator runs two passes:

1. Substring pass. The validator extracts each cited substring and confirms it is a verbatim contiguous substring of the underlying passage. Any whitespace or punctuation drift fails this pass.
2. Entailment pass. The validator asks a separate model whether the cited substring supports the synthesizer's claim. Paraphrases that change meaning fail this pass.

Claims that pass both are tagged validated. Claims that fail the substring pass but pass entailment are tagged partial — the citation needs cleanup but the underlying claim is grounded. Claims that fail entailment are dropped from the output and recorded in the validation_failed_claims array on the response.

The badge

You will see a small pill above every Brief paragraph, Forecast rationale, and Risk entry:

• Green "validated" — both passes cleared
• Amber "partial" — substring drifted, entailment held; the citation will be edited in the next regeneration
• Red "insufficient evidence" — the entailment pass failed; the claim was dropped

You will never see a red "insufficient evidence" pill on a delivered claim — by the time the Brief ships, those claims are gone. The red state surfaces only in the API response under validation_failed_claims so downstream consumers can audit.

What "insufficient evidence" means

Insufficient evidence means the synthesizer composed a claim the sources could not back up — usually because the retrieval stage returned tangentially-relevant passages and the model over-generalized. The right response is not to fix the model output; it is to dig for better sources. Hit "Report inaccuracy" if you can identify a missing source — the moderation queue will route the request to the connector backlog.

Reading a citation

Citations expand inline. Click the footnote marker and you see:

• The source table (notices, filings, regulations, etc.)
• The source URL, document title, and publication date
• The verbatim substring, with the cited fragment highlighted
• A "Open source" link that pivots to the source detail view

Footnote markers are numbered per-paragraph, not per-document, so paragraph 2 footnote [1] is unrelated to paragraph 1 footnote [1].

Why this matters

The competitor surface in this category (GovWin, Govini, HigherGov) tends to summarize without grounding. FedGrade's hard rule is that nothing leaves the system without a verbatim citation. This is the M2 moat in the platform spec — see 13-RISKS_AND_MOATS.md for the strategic context.