Patent Reviews

Microsoft: Generative answer composition from retrieval candidates

A retrieval-then-generate pipeline for producing composed answers with attributable spans.

The system retrieves a candidate set, scores passages for factual coverage, and composes an answer with span-level provenance.

The provenance layer

The interesting architectural choice is that the model is designed to expose which source produced which sentence. That is what makes displayed citations trustworthy enough to ship.

For source websites, this means well-scoped passages with clear factual claims are more likely to survive the composition step intact.