Classify Claim
Five buckets
- simplified-correct: strips detail; underlying claim still holds. Keep.
- simplified-boundary: holds in common case, breaks in edge case. Fold break into post.
- wrong: flat factual error. Fix.
- contested: field actively debating. Hedge.
- overclaim: true narrowly, asserted broadly. Scope.
Examples
- "Softmax turns logits into a probability distribution" → simplified-correct (omits calibration caveats but the core claim holds).
- "Attention is O(n²) in memory" → simplified-boundary (true naive; FlashAttention is O(N)).
- "Softmax produces calibrated probabilities" → wrong (distribution ≠ calibrated probability).
- "LLMs exhibit emergent reasoning with scale" → contested (Schaeffer et al. 2023 actively disputes).
- "RAG beats fine-tuning for domain knowledge" → overclaim (true for tail factoid recall; false for reasoning).
Workflow
Per claim:
- [ ] Step 1: Match claim to nearest bucket by definition
- [ ] Step 2: Assign confidence: low (pattern-matching, need source), medium (field knowledge suggests), high (sure)
- [ ] Step 3: Write one-sentence rationale
- [ ] Step 4: If low confidence, defer final classification until cross-reference-claim confirms
Guardrails
- Never classify
wrong without a post-classification primary-source check (that's cross-reference-claim).
- Respect
[contrarian] regions: wrong downgrades to contested or overclaim inside contrarian annotations.
- Classification is structural — goes on the claim object, not in prose.
- If the writer's glossary defines a term differently than the field,
glossary-alignment-check ran first and flagged it — apply the writer's definition for classification.
- Default to the more conservative classification on ties.
simplified-boundary beats wrong when the claim is right "most of the time."
