Operationalizing the evidence_support term in the Confidence-Evidence Ratio (+)

Develop a concrete and deployable operationalization of the evidence_support term in the proposed Confidence-Evidence Ratio (+) for epistemic alignment, specifying reliable procedures to quantify the evidential grounding of large language model outputs so the metric can be empirically applied.

Background

Section 6 introduces the Epistemic Alignment Principle and proposes the Confidence-Evidence Ratio (+) as a regulative metric intended to align a model’s assertoric force with its evidential warrant. The metric requires estimating two quantities: expected confidence (based on linguistic markers of assertoric force) and evidence_support (a proxy for evidential grounding).

While the paper sketches possible proxies and acknowledges technical difficulties (e.g., retrieval overlap, source-grounded factuality scores, and calibration-based measures), it explicitly states that operationalizing the evidence_support component is not yet solved, marking it as an open engineering problem crucial for making the metric actionable in practice.