SECAI Core · phase 5 of 15 · noun
Source grounding
The technique of connecting an AI model's outputs to specific, retrieved, and verifiable external information sources, and constraining the model to use those sources when generating its responses
The Explain card
- Plain English
- Source grounding connects a model's outputs to specific, retrieved and verifiable external sources, and constrains the model to rely on those sources rather than its own memory when answering.
- Example
- A legal research assistant is told to answer only from the retrieved statutes and to cite the section for every claim. If the sources do not cover the question, it must say so rather than improvise a plausible-sounding clause.
- Why it matters
- Grounding makes outputs checkable. An analyst can follow the citation and confirm the claim, which turns a confident guess into evidence-backed text. Ungrounded answers are hard to audit and easy to fabricate.
- Hook
- Grounding means the model shows its receipts, and it only spends what it can prove.
Word knowledge
How the word is built, where it came from, and what it sits beside in memory.
In a sentence
The policy copilot applies source grounding to each clause returned by the vector store, then prints the clause ID beside every sentence of the answer.
Why these words
- source Old French sourse, a spring, from Latin surgere, to rise supplies the origin half, so the tying-down hangs on a document rather than on the earth
- grounding Old English grund, bottom or earth, plus English -ing names the fastening, so the phrase treats that origin as a foundation
Where it came from
- Origin
- English collocation from Old French sourse (a spring, from Latin surgere, to rise) and Old English grund (bottom, earth) as a gerund
- Entered the language
- early 2020s
- What changed
- Source had meant a spring of water, then an origin, then a person or document that supplies information. Ground had meant the earth underfoot, then a foundation, then the electrical bond that keeps a circuit honest. English already used grounding for tying a claim to evidence, and Harnad applied the gerund to machines in 1990. Retrieval products in the early 2020s put source in front of it, and the pair became the everyday name for an answer that must arrive with its documents.
How it is spelled
- Pattern
- ou in source spells /ɔː/, as in force and course
- Pattern
- ce after a vowel spells /s/, never /k/
- Pattern
- ou in ground spells /aʊ/, as in found and sound
- Pattern
- nd stays a cluster, as in found and sound
- Pattern
- -ing turns a verb into a noun of activity
- Breaks the pattern
- the noun phrase stays two words; the hyphen appears only when it modifies another noun
- Breaks the pattern
- ou in source is /ɔː/, while ou in ground is /aʊ/
- Breaks the pattern
- ground is noun, verb, and past of grind with no spelling change
Spelled like
- resource
- force
- course
- background
- found
Broken into chunks
-
source
- resource
- outsource
- sourced
-
ground
- background
- underground
- grounded
-
ing
- training
- learning
- reasoning
What it sits beside
Same subject
Same shape
- knowledge grounding
- symbol grounding
- source control
- source code
Grounding family
Source compounds
- source code
- source control
- open source
Retrieval pipeline neighbors
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 5: Interacting with Models: Prompting, APIs, and Retrieval
With a working model and clean data, learn the interaction layer — how users and systems communicate instructions and retrieve grounded answers.
