citefind: a note that cites three works is three references

Measured against the citations an LLM had already extracted from 40 books of
the same corpus — 19,340 of them over 3,424 chunks — and improved where the
comparison showed a real gap rather than a difference of task.

On pages of notes, where most citations live: year agreement with the model
44% -> 56%, title 18% -> 23%, author 16% -> 24%.

What changed:

- A note listing several works, semicolon-separated, becomes one record per
  work. The note number is kept on all of them.
- A full stop is not a separator. It parts the author from the title in every
  bibliography entry there is.
- A page of body text with notes at its foot no longer reads the body as the
  first note.
- A run carrying a page reference or a semicolon is not reported as a title.
- Six sentences with no imprint, no page and no identifier is a remark about
  the argument, not a reference.
- A translator standing where the journal goes is a credit, not a container,
  and `(London, 1973)` is a place, not a publisher.

The model is not ground truth and the comparison is not a score: on several
sampled disagreements it named the journal where the article was wanted, or
the collected works instead of the essay.
This commit is contained in:
funkpower
2026-09-20 11:10:42 -04:00
parent c071f84829
commit f3e70b9bf7
4 changed files with 243 additions and 13 deletions
+18 -2
View File
@@ -145,7 +145,17 @@ two references together.
A note that cites nothing is dropped. A page of notes mixes bibliographic
notes with discursive ones, and a remark about the argument is not a
reference.
reference — and one that runs on for six sentences with no imprint, no page
reference and no identifier is a remark whatever else it mentions.
A note that cites **several works** becomes several records, cut at the
semicolons that separate them, each keeping the note's number. A full stop
separates works in a note too, and is not used: it also separates the author
from the title in every bibliography entry ever written.
Where the first note number sits a long way into the block, what precedes it
is the body of the page rather than a note that lost its number, and it is
left out.
**A bibliography** numbers nothing, so the signal is layout: a blank line
between entries, a hanging indent under each, or the surname-comma opening
@@ -163,7 +173,13 @@ entirely — there is nothing in it to ask about.
**Report a title it did not find.** An entry held together by commas alone,
with no names to anchor it, yields no title rather than its own text echoed
back.
back. Nor does a run carrying a page reference or a semicolon count as one:
that is two entries run together, or a reference to a work rather than the
name of one.
**Name a place of publication as the publisher.** `(London, 1973)` says where
a book was published and not by whom, so `container` stays empty. The place
is still in `text`.
A rule of dashes where the author should be is the exception, and a
deliberate one: `———. *The Second Book*.` means the author of the entry above,