- aborist/qa/verify.py: three strategies tried in sequence. quote uses
sequential pairing (1st & 2nd `"`, 3rd & 4th, ...) which eliminates
the phantom inter-pair captures regex pairing produced on adjacent
quote pairs like `"title" prose "quote"`. span checks bullet/sentence
lines verbatim. entity matches multi-word proper nouns; gated by
policy ∈ {strict, hybrid, drop, proximity}. Default proximity
promotes to STRICT only when N=3 verified entities cluster within
W=300 chars in source — separates structural grounding (cast list,
infobox) from incidental mention (scattered plot summary).
- aborist/store.py: schema CHECK now `('STRICT','HYBRID','UNGROUNDED')`.
Migration helper rebuilds legacy `('STRICT','HYBRID','VISUAL')`
tables via temp-table copy, translating VISUAL → UNGROUNDED in the
SELECT. Idempotent — DDL inspection skips the rebuild on already-
migrated DBs.
- aborist/cli.py: new `aborist reclassify` re-runs the verifier
against existing live records under the current entity policy; no
LLM calls. --compare runs all four policies side-by-side, --dry-run
reports transitions without writing. Cold-source records skipped.
One providence_reclassify audit event per changed row.
- AuditMode.UNGROUNDED replaces VISUAL across search backend, FTS5,
test fixtures, CLAUDE.md. The substrate (Merkle-AGI) name was
about FOR-style visualization; in the RAG layer the semantic is
"no recoverable grounding," so the label now says that.
DEFAULT_QUERY_POLICY gains entity_policy + entity_proximity_n +
entity_proximity_window so any tuning folds into governance_policy_hash
and invalidates cache cleanly.
Adds aborist/qa/verify.py — three-strategy verifier (explicit quotes,
bullet/sentence spans, multi-word proper nouns) that lexically checks
every claim against retrieved context under norm-v1 + lowercase. The
strategy that fires is recorded as verifier_method for diagnostics.
Entity strategy gates classification via an entity_policy
(strict/hybrid/proximity/drop) so a single proper-noun match no longer
overclaims STRICT — proximity (default) requires a cluster of 3+
verified entities within 300 chars.
Wires into ask() and query(). System prompts now require verbatim
quoted spans for every factual claim, restated via a user-turn
grounding_reminder one message before sources arrive (recent
user-turn instructions outweigh decayed system-turn rules under long
context in Hermes).
providence_cache gains 5 columns (audit_mode, n_quotes, n_verified,
unverified_quotes, verifier_method) with CHECK constraints. A
connect-time _migrate_audit_mode() ALTERs legacy DBs idempotently.
Cache hits return the persisted audit_mode rather than asserting
STRICT unconditionally.
CLI:
emergent list VISUAL/HYBRID records; --aggregate ranks
unverified quotes by frequency (corpus-growth signal).
reclassify re-run the verifier against live providence records;
cold-source records skipped; --dry-run reports
transitions without writing; each change writes one
'providence_reclassify' audit event.
