3.15 Attributed reporting — prose that arrives with its receipts

A realm that resolves a name against outside sources eventually wants to say what it found, in prose. The moment it does, it inherits a problem no query has: a fluent sentence about who someone is looks the same whether a source said it or the model did.

The shape that survives that is one call returning both:

MATCH (f:PartyFamilyQuery {name: $familyName})-[:HAS_BACKER]->(b:FamilyBacker)
WITH b ORDER BY b.total DESC LIMIT $limit
OPTIONAL MATCH (c:CoverageQuery {phrase: b.donor_name})-[:HAS_READ_RESULT]->(h:SourceHit)
WITH b, collect({kind: …, title: h.title, url: h.url, text: left(h.excerpt, 700)})[0..3] AS srcs
WITH b.donor_name AS subject, srcs,
     b.donor_name + ' disclosed $' + toString(b.total) + '.' +
     reduce(acc = '', s IN srcs |
       acc + ' SOURCE, ' + s.kind + ' — ' + s.title + ' <' + s.url + '>: ' + s.text) AS line
RETURN subject,
       render(line, 'Report the facts, then who this is according to its SOURCE lines, naming each
                     source. Never assert a connection yourself; a source says it.') AS prose,
       head(collect(srcs)) AS attributions

Four things in that query are doing work, and each was learned by getting it wrong first.

The evidence travels in the same row as the prose. render(...) and collect(...) are two aggregations over one group, so a caller cannot quote the sentence without the citations that support it. Fetching citations in a second query looks equivalent and is not: the two can be separated, and then every subjective statement in the prose is unsupported by construction.

One composition per subject, not one per report. Returning subject beside the aggregation makes the reduction run once per subject. That is a correctness choice. Composing eight subjects in one pass drifts — a synonym here, a connection there — and a single bad sentence condemns the whole output; composing one subject at a time keeps each paragraph’s world small, and a paragraph that fails can be composed again while the others stand. It also makes coverage structural: N subjects in, N rows out, and a missing subject is a missing row rather than a silently shorter paragraph.

The quote is bounded. A page excerpt can be thousands of characters; three of those per subject exceeds what one composition call holds, and the reduction then folds its own partials and quietly drops subjects. Cut the quote to the sentence that identifies the subject.

The source’s KIND is a value, not a footnote. A substantial-holder notice lodged under law, a government register and a masthead are different grades of evidence, and a reader must be able to tell which they are being shown without opening anything. Rank by that grade before slicing, so what survives is the strongest evidence rather than whatever the search engine ranked first.

Checking it

Return the same joined rows unaggregated from a sibling view. An aggregation consumes its input, so that sibling is the only way to see what the composer actually read — and with it, every word of the prose can be held against the sources for that subject: a word appearing in none of them is how a fabrication reads. Judging per subject is stricter than judging a whole report, because a sentence about one subject cannot then be “supported” by a page fetched for another.

What to do with a word that traces to nothing is a publishing decision, not a query one. Reporting it beside the paragraph is honest; quietly smoothing it away is the failure the whole pattern exists to prevent.

---