> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.shamwari.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Ground, and why citation is the whole point

> Zimbabwean law, tax rates and policy change often, and a confident wrong answer about a statutory instrument is worse than no answer.

## Retrieval

Two searches run together — one semantic, one keyword — and their *rankings*
are fused rather than their scores. The two indexes produce numbers on
incompatible scales, and averaging them ranks badly.

Chunking follows the document's own structure: *Part*, *Chapter*, *Schedule*,
*Section*, *Article*, *Clause*. This is the difference between a citation
that reads **section 56** and one that reads *chunk 47*, and the citation is
the entire product claim. Repealed provisions are excluded from retrieval
rather than filtered out afterwards, so a superseded rate can never be
quoted as current.

Embeddings are multilingual by choice, so a question asked in Shona can find
a passage written in English. That was the deciding factor in choosing the
model, and it is now locked: changing it would mean re-embedding the whole
corpus and rebuilding the indexes.

## When Ground does not know

Shamwari says so, answers from general knowledge, and marks that it has done
so. It does not invent a section number, a statutory instrument, a rate or a
date — and where an answer turns on a current figure it cannot confirm, it
says the figure must be verified and names the authority to verify it with.

The miss is recorded. A question we could not answer is the most useful thing
a customer can tell us about what to ingest next, so the gaps become the
corpus roadmap rather than disappearing.

<Note>
  **Some sources are not ours to take.** Every source carries a recorded reuse basis, and the ingestion tool refuses a
  source whose terms have not been read rather than warning and continuing.

  Being able to *show* something is not permission to *train* on it. Scraped
  news can be cited and linked, and is not training data. Copyrighted exam
  material is not scraped at all — licence, or no answer.
</Note>


## Related topics

- [An AI companion that refuses to send your data away](/index.md)
- [What concurrent traffic looks like](/traffic.md)
- [Three data scopes, not three tiers](/scopes.md)
- [How we describe it](/language.md)
- [Routing and models](/routing.md)