Top 3 Citations Interview Questions
Browse 3 real-world technical and behavioral interview questions about Citations. Review scenarios, edge cases, and architectural best practices.
Your RAG assistant cites the wrong document, and sounds completely sure of itself. How do you find which stage failed?
Replay a wrong citation stage by stage: does the pointer resolve to the passage the model saw, does that passage support the claim, did the right document survive reranking, and did retrieval find it at all. A golden set with gold document ids and supporting spans turns each check into a per-stage metric.
How do you measure hallucination in a way you would put in front of a customer?
Report two rates separately: ungroundedness, meaning claims the provided sources do not support, and factual error, meaning claims wrong about the world. Measure per claim, publish the abstention rate beside them, and name the query set that produced the numbers. Use this hallucination answer to show the decision, trade-off, and evidence rather than a memorised definition.
What metadata do you store alongside each chunk, and what is each field for?
Each chunk needs its source document and version, its section path, an anchor precise enough to open, effective and ingestion dates, and the permission set that governed the original — because filtering, citation, freshness and access control are all served from metadata rather than from the vector.