From bde1bd61f43ca005249ef45945dce2f0e6619845 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "russell@unturf.com" Date: Fri, 1 May 2026 20:55:23 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] qa(retrieval): mind/brain-tech synonym group for intent-question queries MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Closes the 2026-05-01 retrieval gap fox surfaced on: Q: what technology are currently or soon available which may enable one person to reconstruct and understand some or a portion of another persons thoughts or ideas without speaking or sign language? Pre-fix: top-K = [Videoconferencing, Telepathy, Identity, PKM, Intrapersonal]; only Videoconferencing used (BM25 won on "person/language/speak" token density). Verifier returned EVIDENCE-WARRANTED-PARTIAL 2/5 with Videoconferencing cited as evidence for "currently no technology...". Telepathy was retrieved but unused — title-relevance filter dropped it to body-density accept path with a low score. Post-fix: same top-K but Telepathy now SURVIVES title-relevance (its title token "telepathy" is in the accept set via synonym expansion). Title-token-boost lifts it. EVIDENCE-WARRANTED-PARTIAL 6/10 with Telepathy E4 now cited alongside Videoconferencing — sources used 5/5. Adds a 7th SYNONYM_GROUPS entry mixing concept tokens (thoughts, mind, cognition, consciousness) with specialized entity tokens (telepathy, neurotechnology, BCI, fMRI, EEG, TMS, transcranial). A query naming either side expands to the whole family, so the title-relevance accept path admits brain-tech pages even when the question is phrased in lay vocabulary. Limitation accepted: this only affects title-relevance filtering & title-token rerank, not the FTS5 BM25 retrieval that produces the top-K. Pages whose BM25 score is below the top-K cutoff (e.g. Neurotechnology at #4 in fox's manual-hint Run 2) still won't surface unless FTS5-side synonym expansion is added too. Tracked as a follow-on ticket — for now, query-time retrieval hints ("transcranial knowledge acquisition") continue to be the manual escape hatch when intent vocabulary doesn't lexically anchor. Tests: 624 passed (no regression). --- aborist/qa/concepts.py | 19 +++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 19 insertions(+) diff --git a/aborist/qa/concepts.py b/aborist/qa/concepts.py index 14ae0f5..0897fc1 100644 --- a/aborist/qa/concepts.py +++ b/aborist/qa/concepts.py @@ -47,6 +47,25 @@ SYNONYM_GROUPS: list[frozenset[str]] = [ frozenset({"windows", "microsoft", "win32", "winnt", "win9x"}), # Linux family frozenset({"linux", "gnu", "ubuntu", "debian", "fedora", "redhat", "kernel"}), + # Mind-reading / brain-computer-interface family. Closes the + # 2026-05-01 intent-question gap where "what technology can + # reconstruct another person's thoughts" pulled Videoconferencing + # via "person/language/speak" BM25 density and left Telepathy / + # Neurotechnology pages unused at #2 / #4. The concept tokens + # (thoughts, mind, cognition) sit alongside the specialized + # entity tokens (telepathy, BCI, fMRI, TMS) so a query naming + # either side expands to the whole family. Title-token-boost + # in `_rerank_by_title` then promotes the brain-tech pages above + # the lexical-decoy pages whose body shares only generic verbs. + frozenset({ + "telepathy", "telepathic", "neurotechnology", "neuroscience", + "neuroimaging", "neural", "neuron", "neurons", + "brain", "brains", "mind", "minds", "cognition", "cognitive", + "consciousness", "thoughts", "thinking", "thought", + "psychic", "psychokinesis", "esp", "clairvoyance", + "fmri", "eeg", "fnirs", "meg", "ecog", + "tms", "transcranial", "bci", + }), ]