Retrieval: treating provenance as a first-class concern

The common failure mode in a knowledge-base project is not "it cannot be found" but "it was found and nobody dares use it" — usually because the answer cannot be traced to a specific document and location.

The current direction is to make citation a fixed output of the retrieval pipeline rather than an addendum at generation time. That changes chunking strategy: a chunk has to retain enough positional information to locate itself.

This is a record of a research direction, not a statement of completed capability.