Files
confidence-engine/docs/experiment-57j6.md
T

1.9 KiB

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.