Groundedness

Groundedness measures whether an answer’s claims are supported by the evidence available in the request, such as retrieved passages or tool results.

Tiny example

Evidence says “Returns are accepted for 30 days.” The answer “Returns are accepted for 60 days” is ungrounded, even if another company happens to use that policy.

Related but different

• Correctness asks whether a claim is true according to a reference.
• Groundedness asks whether the supplied evidence supports it.
• Completeness asks whether important parts of the question were answered.

FDE note

Evaluate claim by claim and retain source IDs. A fluent answer with a citation is not necessarily grounded if the cited passage does not entail the claim.

See Faithfulness for the closely related term and its distinction from answer relevance and correctness.¹

Footnotes

1. LangChain’s RAG evaluation tutorial separates answer-versus-context evaluation from answer-versus-question and answer-versus-reference evaluation. ↩