Inspectable document answers
Marella AI can link an answer to supporting document sources and, where parsing data allows, the relevant page and passage. That creates a review path. It does not make every cited answer correct, complete or safe to act on.
Answer and source, side by side
Made-up example. Not customer data, and not a performance claim.
Representative question
The answer
Closed client records are retained for seven years from the engagement end date and then enter an approved disposal reviewC1 · §4.2. A written legal hold pauses disposal until the responsible owner confirms that the hold has endedC2 · §4.4.
Supporting source
Illustrative pages 4–5
Closed client records must be retained for seven years from the recorded engagement end date. At the end of that period, the records owner must complete the approved disposal review.
Supports: Seven-year retention period and the disposal-review condition.
A written legal hold suspends the normal disposal schedule. Records covered by the hold must not be destroyed until the responsible legal owner confirms in writing that the hold has ended.
Supports: The exception for records covered by a written legal hold.
This is an illustration, not a screenshot of real customer data. Test the product on your own documents.
The four steps behind a citation
A footnote only helps if you can follow it back: to the documents it was allowed to search, the passage it came from, and the person who checked it.
Search and retrieval narrow the document set to the segments relevant to the question and permissions in force.
The generated answer can carry citation metadata that points back to supporting source material.
For supported formats and available coordinates, a reviewer can inspect the cited page and highlighted passage.
You test correctness, completeness, conflicts and no-answer behaviour on a representative set of documents.
How to evaluate citation quality
These are the conditions to test for. They are not results we have published.
| Test / dimension | Controlled prompt | Pass condition | Failure signal |
|---|---|---|---|
| T01Known answerCitation correctness | Ask a question with an answer in one controlled passage. | The cited passage directly supports the answer's material claim. | The source is merely related, or contradicts the answer. |
| T02Multi-claim answerCitation completeness | Ask a question whose answer needs two independent policy conditions. | Every material claim has adequate support; uncited additions are absent. | One citation is used to imply support for a separate, unsupported claim. |
| T03Absent answerNo-answer behaviour | Ask for a value or rule deliberately omitted from the document set. | The system states that the supplied material does not establish an answer. | A plausible value is invented or borrowed from an unrelated source. |
| T04Conflicting sourcesConflict handling | Supply two current-looking documents with incompatible instructions. | The conflict and both sources are surfaced for an authorised owner to resolve. | One version is silently selected without an approved precedence rule. |
What this mechanism does
What it does not prove
Questions buyers ask
A cited AI answer links material claims to source documents or passages so a reviewer can inspect the evidence. A citation is a verification route, not automatic proof that the answer is correct or complete.
No. Retrieval, citations, validation and abstention tests can reduce and expose unsupported output, but they do not eliminate model error. Buyers should test known, absent and conflicting-source questions.
Marella can link cited answers to source material and can highlight a relevant page or passage where the document parser provides usable coordinates. Exact behaviour depends on file format, parsing quality and configuration.
Use a controlled test set that measures whether each citation supports its claim, whether all material claims are covered, and whether the system abstains or surfaces conflicts when the document set does not justify one answer.
Run a representative test
The initial form asks about the workflow and constraints only. If we go further, we agree a secure way to send documents.