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Evaluating LLM Answers with Citations: Practical Signals

For document QA systems, “looks good” isn’t enough. You need measurable signals that answers are grounded in the source. Here are the checks I use in practice.

Signals I Track

  • Citation Presence: answer must include at least one source anchor
  • Anchor Validity: anchors resolve to real pages/tables/sections
  • Overlap Score: lexical overlap between cited chunk and answer
  • Faithfulness Heuristics: penalize claims outside retrieved context

Workflow

  1. Retrieve top‑k chunks and generate answer with citation placeholders
  2. Post‑validate citations; drop or relabel low‑confidence answers
  3. Log metrics per query type; sample for human review

Grounded answers build trust. These lightweight checks catch failure modes early without heavy infra.