Generalizes warrant-lite from relation-only to anchor-class warrant.
Two anchor classes now compose:
(1) Proper-noun anchors — gated on relation-question shape; any-match
semantics (existing behavior).
(2) Date anchors — always-on, gated on the CLAIM containing a year or
month name. ALL components (year + month name if present) must
appear in some cited span.
Closes the back-to-the-future failure fox surfaced 2026-05-01:
Q: what date did back to the future come out?
Claim: "Back to the Future was released in theaters on July 3, 1985."
Cited span: trilogy/SNES/pinball prose with '...real 1985...' but
no 'July' anywhere
Pre-fix: EVIDENCE-LINKED · via claim_lattice 1/1
Post-fix: EVIDENCE-LINKED-PARTIAL · via claim_lattice · warrant missing 1/1
Year extraction (4-digit, 1500-2199 range — avoids matching ZIP codes
/ elevations / model IDs) and month extraction (full English month
names — three-letter abbrevs deferred until bench shows the gap).
Both anchors required when both are in the claim. Year-only claim
against year-only span continues to pass; month-only against
month-only continues to pass; month-and-year claim against year-only
span (the BTTF case) now correctly fails.
Architectural note: this generalizes warrant-lite without building a
typed-contract framework (per-question-type rule libraries like
"release_date_lookup with required predicate cues"). The date anchor
primitive catches the date lazy-anchor failure class deterministically
without a per-type rule book; typed contracts earn their slot only if
bench evidence shows general anchors miss specific cases. Dropped the
caller-side is_relation_question gate from verify.py — warrant_check
now decides internally what to enforce based on question shape AND
claim content.
Tests: 29 unit tests in tests/test_warrant.py (was 16). New tests
cover extract_date_anchors (year, month, dedup, non-year-skip,
empty), warrant_check date semantics (BTTF case, year-only,
year-in-unrelated-context, month+year composition), proper-noun
warrant skipped without relation question. Full suite: 554 passed,
21 skipped.
Limitation accepted: ISO date format ("1985-07-03") wouldn't satisfy
month-name requirement. Real-world Wikipedia prose uses month names
("released on July 3, 1985"), so the trade-off favors catching the
common case. If bench shows ISO false-rejections, layer in a
month-number alternative to the month-name regex.
russell@unturf.com
7ba1b405ee