Practice · Established · Intermediate
Grounding
Tying a model's answers to verifiable external sources or data rather than its parametric memory.
What Grounding is
A grounded system answers from documents you supplied and can point at the passage it used, which turns an unverifiable claim into a checkable one.
How it works
Grounding is implemented with retrieval, tool calls to authoritative systems, and prompts that instruct the model to answer only from provided context and to say when the context is insufficient.
Why it matters
It is the difference between an assistant that is useful in regulated work and one that is merely entertaining.
Common uses
- →Enterprise knowledge assistants
- →Customer support over documentation
- →Research summarisation with citations
Strengths
- ✓Reduces hallucination materially
- ✓Enables audit trails
Watch for
- ✓Only as good as the source corpus
- ✓Model can still misread a passage
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