CitationGate: grounding every finding

CitationGate is what makes LexCore verification-first. When an agent proposes a finding, it has to attach the exact clause that supports it. That quote is then located verbatim in your document before the finding is allowed to surface.

The rules

• A finding with no citation is rejected outright.
• Each quote is matched against the source: a whitespace-flexible exact match first, then, for long spans on first verification, a fuzzy word-shingle fallback. A match returns real character offsets and a match type (exact or fuzzy).
• Quotes shorter than 10 characters are rejected. A finding passes only if at least one of its citations verifies.
• Re-verification after an edit is strict (exact matches only). If you change an amount or a term, the finding that cited the old text is flagged stale instead of being quietly re-matched.
• Every decision (verified, failed, passed, rejected) writes an audit entry.

The one exception: absence

Some of the most useful findings are about what a contract doesn't say, such as a missing indemnity or an absent liability cap. There is no quote to check. Absence findings carry a non-quote evidence type ("the playbook requires this and extraction found no matching provision"), skip the quote gate by design, and default to high supervision, because a false "missing" claim is expensive.