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Verification (Claim Checking)

The verification stage runs between gap analysis and citation export. Before a report is generated, each paper's key points are checked against that paper's own sources — its abstract plus any grounded full-text passages from the fulltext stage. Unsupported claims are flagged rather than presented as fact.

What readers see

  • Flagged key points render with an (unverified) marker in the thematic findings.
  • The report's summary area carries an aggregate line, e.g. Claim verification (heuristic): 11/12 key points supported by paper sources — the verification field of the JSON report holds the same numbers (claims_checked, claims_unverified, method).

How claims are checked

  • LLM (when synthesis LLM mode is on and structured outputs are enabled) — a structured verdict per paper naming the claim numbers the sources do not support, judged strictly from the provided material.
  • Heuristic (always available) — a claim is flagged when fewer than min_term_coverage of its content terms appear in the paper's sources. Flagging is deliberately conservative: with no sources at all, nothing is flagged, and abstract-derived heuristic findings pass by construction.

Identity note: verification never rewrites claims — it only annotates unverified_points on the paper analyses and records the verification_summary artifact consumed by report generation.

Configuration

Key Default Meaning
verification.enabled true Toggle the stage
verification.min_term_coverage 0.5 Heuristic support threshold

Failure behavior

A failed LLM verdict falls back to the heuristic for that paper. The stage passes gap-analysis output through unchanged, so downstream stages are unaffected by verification results.