Groundedness
The property that important claims in an output are supported by, and traceable to, specified evidence, source material, or context.
Example
A response claims that a method reduces processing time, but none of the supplied sources supports that claim.
Distinctions and cautions
In this catalog, Groundedness is a property of the generated output; Grounding is the process or system mechanism of connecting outputs to evidence. Its usage overlaps with Faithfulness, but Groundedness foregrounds claim-to-evidence support and traceability.
Terminology note
The process/output distinction between Grounding and Groundedness is an editorial convention adopted by this Catalog. It is not a universally established, formally standardized distinction across the research field.
Evidence
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ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
- Title
- ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
- Author / organization
- Saad-Falcon et al.
- Year
- 2024
- Source type / publication status
- NAACL peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Context relevance, answer faithfulness, answer relevance, Retrieval Failure.
- Scope and limitations
- The evaluator design itself can introduce errors.
- Access / version note
- Published NAACL.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.20(DOI resolver)
Overview of the TREC 2025 Retrieval Augmented Generation Track
- Title
- Overview of the TREC 2025 Retrieval Augmented Generation Track
- Author / organization
- NIST TREC 2025
- Year
- 2025
- Source type / publication status
- Official evaluation proceedings; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Grounding, completeness, attribution, retrieval/relevance, RAG evaluation.
- Scope and limitations
- Operational definitions for a shared evaluation task, not standardized definitions.
- Access / version note
- Official proceedings page.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- Official URL / recorded link