Show Me Where It Says That: Tracing Every Fact Back to Its Source Passage

Every investigator has had this conversation with a senior officer. A line in a report says the subject was a director of a certain company. The officer asks: where does it say that?

If the answer is "the software said so", the line is worthless. It cannot go into a briefing, it cannot be relied on in a review, and it certainly cannot go anywhere near a prosecutor.

This is the central problem with using AI on case work. A language model writes fluent, confident text. Fluency is not evidence. The only thing that turns a generated sentence into something an investigator can use is a link back to the exact words it came from.

What Anvexer links

When Anvexer reads a document, whether it is an uploaded case file or a web page, the facts it takes out of that document keep a reference to the passage they came from. That applies to:

• the passages recorded about a person or organisation
• each attribute, such as a date of birth, an address or an identity number
• each relationship between two people or organisations, such as "director of" or "brother of"
• the evidence used when a hypothesis is tested

The reference points to the document and to the exact position of the quoted words in its text. It is not a loose link to "somewhere in this file".

What the investigator sees

Clicking a citation opens the source and shows the quoted words in it. For a PDF, the page is shown with the passage marked on it. A web source shows its title and the original address. An uploaded document shows its title, with no made-up web address.

So when the officer asks "where does it say that?", the investigator can show the page.

Quotations do not change after the fact

A quotation, once recorded, is never edited. If a document is read again, perhaps with better text extraction, and the same words now sit in a different place, the old facts are withdrawn and new ones are recorded against new quotations.

This matters for review. A fact cannot silently shift to rest on different wording than it did when an officer first checked it.

When the source itself changes

Documents get re-read. A scanned file may be processed again with better settings. When that happens, Anvexer tells the reader whether the quotation is still in the current text of the document, has moved, or only exists in an earlier reading of it. It does not pretend a quotation is current when it is not.

Why this is the right design

An investigation tool that summarises well but cites loosely creates more work, not less. Every fact has to be checked again by hand, and the time saved by the summary is lost in the checking.

A tool that cites precisely does the opposite. The investigator reads the finding, checks the passage in one click, and moves on. The summary is only as useful as the investigator's ability to verify it, and that ability is what Anvexer is built to protect.

Frequently asked questions

Does every sentence in a dossier carry a citation?

Facts taken from documents, such as attributes, relationships and passages about a subject, are tied to their source passage. Some summary text written over many sources draws on several of them at once; investigators should treat those summaries as a guide to the cited facts beneath them.

Can a citation point to a scanned paper document?

Yes. Scanned documents are converted to text, and citations point into that text. For PDFs, the viewer marks the passage on the page.

What if a web page has changed since it was read?

The citation points to the text Anvexer read and stored at the time, not to the live page. The original address is shown so the investigator can check the current version.