# Experiment 57J.6 — Rejected Answerability Corroboration Candidate

**Status:** REJECTED (not production)

## Established Defect

`conjunctionCount + 1` can mistake alternative wording for independent answer dimensions. A label/description pair containing "scenario, problem, or data set" has `conjunctionCount=2`, yielding a minimum score of 3 that inflates its perceived compoundness beyond what the surface grammar warrants.

## Candidate Attempted

Commit `60048a5` made conjunction-based evidence require structural corroboration from existing graph edges before treating a question as decomposable. Fresh-evidence questions with "and" needed at least one established relationship edge to trigger decomposition.

## What Candidate Improved

The minimal clarification case:

```
The actual scenario, problem description, or data set intended for analysis.
```

Now correctly scored as independently answerable (score=1) rather than falsely flagged as compound (score=3).

## Why Candidate Was Rejected

A genuinely compound fresh unknown such as:

```
What evidence supports the savings estimate and what evidence supports the retention assumption?
```

Also became independently answerable because no graph structure existed yet. Without any established relationship edges, the conjunction corroboration gate blocked decomposition of a legitimately compound question.

The implementation prompt explicitly required stopping if Case 1 (false positive minimal clarification) and Case 2 (true compound preserved) could not both be preserved with existing signals. The candidate crossed that stop condition by sacrificing Case 2 to fix Case 1.

## Durable Finding

> Surface grammar is not sufficient evidence of semantic compoundness, but fresh graph state may also be too sparse to establish compoundness structurally. A future refinement must resolve that distinction rather than choosing one failure mode by weakening the other.