Empirically observed 2026-05-01: long discursive questions like
'what technology is currently or soon available which may enable
one person to reconstruct another person's thoughts...' under-
retrieve because their content tokens get diluted by template
phrasing. AND-mode FTS5 returns zero hits; OR-fallback ranks
unrelated articles by raw BM25.
Fox's discovery: appending domain keywords ('transcranial knowledge
acquisition') to the question lifts the verdict from HYBRID 6/10
to STRICT 1/1 by narrowing OR-mode retrieval to the topical
article (Neurotechnology). The keywords act as an operator hint
about what the question is really asking.
This commit exposes that pattern as a first-class flag without
polluting the question text:
--retrieval-keywords TEXT on `aborist query`
K="..." on `make query`
Plumbing: the keywords are concatenated with the question for
FTS5 search and title-filter token construction only. The LLM
still sees the original question; the verifier still checks against
the original question; cache_key still computes from the original
question. Keywords are session-only — successive calls with
different keywords on the same question can cache-hit each other.
Pair with BURN=1 for fresh inference per call.
Live verification:
make query Q="...thoughts...without speaking or sign language."
K="transcranial knowledge acquisition" BURN=1
-> STRICT 2/2 via claim_lattice, 37.5s, Neurotechnology article
cited for fMRI and DBS claims.
Without K: HYBRID 6/10 with Videoconferencing/Telepathy as top
sources — model hallucinated structure across irrelevant chunks.
russell@unturf.com
2d6a86b991