How Wickline decides what to cite

A citation is a promise: this sentence came from that page. Wickline only makes promises it has checked, and this note explains the check.

We get two kinds of support tickets about citations. The first is "this number doesn't match the source", which is a bug and we fix it. The second is "why didn't it answer?", which usually means the rule below did its job.

Passages, not files

When you upload a file, Wickline splits it into passages of two to six sentences. Each passage keeps an address: file, page, paragraph, and for tables the row and column. A 64-page lease becomes around 400 passages 1.

Questions search passages, not files. That matters because a file can be about leases in general and still never mention a break date. Searching passages finds the one sentence that does.

• Scanned pages go through text recognition before they're split.
• Headings travel with their passages, so "clause 14.2" stays attached to its text.
• You can search passages yourself with Cmd K in any collection.

The support rule

Before an answer reaches you, every sentence that states a fact is checked against the passages Wickline cited for it. A second model reads the sentence and the passage together and answers one question: does this passage say this?

If no passage supports a sentence, the sentence doesn't ship. It's rewritten from what the passages do say, or removed.

The check runs on the server, after the answer is written and before it streams to you, which is why you sometimes see the working mark pause near the end of a long answer.

{
  "sentence": "Notice has to arrive by December 31, 2026.",
  "passage": "halden-lease-2023.pdf#p15.c14-3",
  "support": 0.94,
  "kept": true
}

Scores and thresholds

The check returns a support score from 0 to 1. We keep a sentence at 0.8 or above. We picked that number by reading 2,400 sentences by hand and finding where false support started to show up 2.

Below 0.8, the sentence is rewritten from the passage's own words and checked again. If the rewrite still fails, it's dropped and the answer says what it couldn't confirm.

When it says no

Sometimes nothing in your files supports an answer. Wickline then says so in one sentence and lists what it searched, so you can tell "not in these files" from "searched the wrong way".

We'd rather lose a little helpfulness than ship one confident sentence nobody can check. In our September study, refusing below 0.8 cost 4% of answers and removed almost all unsupported claims 2.

Tables inside scans

Until 2.4, a scanned rent schedule was one long passage, and the best citation was the page. Now each row is its own passage with row and column labels attached, so "the rent in July 2027" cites table 1, row 7 3.