Document citations: answers that show their source

When you upload reference documents to a project, GPTree does more than read them. Every completed document is broken into addressable passages, and when the assistant uses one of those passages to answer you, the answer carries a small numbered chip right after the claim it supports.

Click the chip and GPTree shows you the passage itself: the exact text and the document it belongs to. If the passage comes from an earlier version of that document, or the document has a newer version, the chip's panel says so. You never have to take an answer on faith or scroll a long file hunting for the sentence the model meant.

Why this matters

Models are persuasive even when they are wrong. A citation chip changes the question from "does this sound right" to "here is the sentence it came from, judge for yourself." That is the difference between an answer you can forward to a teammate and an answer you have to re-verify by hand.

GPTree verifies each passage before showing it. Every citation is checked against a fingerprint of the original document text. If the stored passage no longer matches, GPTree says the passage is unavailable rather than showing you something that might be wrong. A citation you can click is a citation that checked out.

How it works

1. Add reference documents to a project in the project's settings and files area. PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, JSON, Markdown and plain text files work today.
2. GPTree extracts the text and splits it into passages in the background. This usually takes a few seconds after upload.
3. Ask questions in any conversation inside that project. When the assistant's answer uses a passage, a numbered chip appears after the sentence it supports.
4. Click a chip to open the passage and the name of its source document.

If a document was just uploaded and is still being processed, answers simply arrive without chips for a moment and pick them up on the next turn. Nothing blocks your conversation.

Good to know

• Citations point at the version of the document the passage came from. If you replace a document with a new version, old answers keep their original citations and new answers cite the new version.
• Deleting a document retires its passages: chips in old answers will report the passage as unavailable rather than showing content you removed.
• Long documents may not fit in a single turn. When that happens the assistant says how much it was shown, for example that it read 12 of 31 passages from a file. That describes the excerpt, not your file: the document itself is complete.
• If the stored passages for a project cannot be checked against the current document text, the assistant says citations are unavailable for that turn and answers without chips, rather than showing a source it cannot stand behind.
• Citation chips appear in your own chats. Public share links show clean answer text without chips.
• Citations cover project reference documents and files you attach to a message in a conversation. An attached file is broken into passages the same way, so a chip on an answer that used it opens the exact passage from the file you dropped in.

When you upload a newer version

Most documents get revised. When you upload a new version of a file you already have in a project, GPTree notices that the two look like the same document and asks whether the newer one replaces the older one. It shows you why it thinks so: the same filename, the same title once dates and version numbers are set aside, or how much of the text matches.

Nothing changes until you answer. That is deliberate, because if GPTree guessed wrong it would quietly stop using a document you still rely on.

Once you confirm:

• New answers come only from the version you marked as current.
• The older file stays in your project files, marked as superseded, so nothing disappears on you.
• Answers you already received keep working. Their chips still open the passage they quoted, because that is genuinely what the document said at the time.

The useful part is what a chip on an older version tells you. If the sentence still appears in the current version, it says so. If the newer version removed it, the chip says the passage is no longer in the current version, so you are not left quoting a claim your own document has since dropped. When a file has been re-read since (a scanned PDF, for instance) and GPTree cannot tell for certain either way, it says that rather than guessing.

You can undo a grouping at any time, and the older document goes straight back to being used in answers.