# Methodology

## Objective

The private project explored how to build a source-grounded assistant across three distinct layers:

1. supervised examples that teach answer behavior;
2. retrieval records that preserve source identity and claim boundaries;
3. sealed evaluations that measure retrieval, reasoning, and unsupported-claim behavior.

The public toolkit documents this architecture without distributing the private source corpus.

## Provenance model

Every private source was assigned a namespace, a stable source identifier, a source type, and a confidence or claim-status field. The design deliberately separates:

- direct source evidence;
- implementation metadata;
- secondary summaries;
- theories and fan interpretations;
- independently authored material.

An implementation artifact can support a claim about observed behavior without automatically supporting a claim about narrative intent.

## Split construction

The final SFT release used train, validation, and test splits. Release checks rejected:

- exact prompt or answer-pair overlap across splits;
- normalized overlap after case and whitespace normalization;
- semantic families crossing split boundaries;
- leakage from training prompts into sealed evaluation questions.

The public synthetic records use the same broad chat structure but are newly authored and unrelated to the private source text.

## Evaluation design

The sealed private benchmark covered source-grounded answering, cross-scope reasoning, exact retrieval, chronology, false-premise correction, implementation interpretation, visual identification, citation precision, and missing-source behavior.

Each evaluation record separated required claims, forbidden claims, source references, difficulty, and scoring method. Evaluation files were excluded from training.

## Release validation

The private blocking validator checked structural integrity, source resolution, image validity, manifest consistency, hashes, dataset counts, split isolation, and local-path redaction. Aggregate results are preserved in this public repository; protected inputs and generated content are not.