Turn unstructured text into checkable claims

Extraction is a preparation step

Finding an assertion in a document does not establish that the assertion is correct. Use the word claim in your data contract when a statement has not been assessed. That small naming decision helps prevent downstream tools from presenting extracted material as verified information.

An extraction workflow should identify independently checkable statements while preserving the original passage. It should also distinguish observations, reported allegations, predictions, opinions, and recommendations. The fact that a speaker expressed a view is different from the truth of that view.

Keep the qualifiers that change the question

Consider the fictional sentence “The Meridian catalog estimates approximately four thousand records at launch.” Removing estimates, approximately, or at launch changes what needs to be verified. Preserve those qualifiers in normalized wording and carry unresolved ambiguity forward.

When one sentence contains several claims, split it only where the parts can be assessed independently. Retain shared context such as entity names and time periods. Record a parent sentence identifier so a reviewer can reconstruct how the original passage was decomposed. Avoid turning short, dependent fragments into statements that appear complete but no longer mean the same thing.

A useful extraction response

Include an original document identifier, an original text span, a reproducible locator, a normalized claim, and a record of unresolved entity or date ambiguity. If offsets refer to transformed text, identify that exact text version. Do not reuse positions from an earlier parser output after the document has changed.

Keep processing coverage explicit. A partial extraction should say which material was handled and what was omitted. Unreadable tables, missing pages, and length limits should not disappear behind a successful status. Coverage is part of the result that a verification stage needs to understand.

Test the handoff to verification

The FEVER paper is a research reference for connecting claims with textual evidence and distinguishing supported, refuted, and insufficient-information cases. For your application, test extraction separately from that later assessment so you can locate errors at the right stage.

Use reviewed examples containing negation, nested attribution, near-matching entities, and uncertain quantities. Measure omissions, invented assertions, excessive splitting, and incorrect merging separately. A large output is not a good output when it quietly changes the important claim.

Review the ambiguous cases early

Set a rule for when extraction must request review before retrieval starts. An unresolved pronoun or unclear date may be cheaper to fix at this point than after a verifier has searched for evidence about the wrong statement. Show the original wording beside the normalized version.

Continue with the complete extraction guide and the response schema examples. The aim is a faithful question that another component can answer—not a more polished version of a statement whose meaning has been lost.