What is Citation-vs-paraphrase decision?

The citation-vs-paraphrase decision is the per-chunk step the synthesis stage runs over every surviving reranked candidate — does this chunk get rendered as a verbatim quote in the answer (with a numbered source chip and quoted span the user reads as the engine's evidence), or as a paraphrased composition in the engine's voice (with a numbered source chip but no quoted span), or dropped from the rendered answer entirely (source relegated to the 'further sources' panel). The decision is not random — it correlates with five chunk-side properties: claim specificity (numeric statistics survive as verbatim quotes at 2.4× the rate of vague claims), self-containment (chunks whose claim does not require surrounding paragraph context survive verbatim at 1.7×), rationale shape (chunks that open with a citable claim survive verbatim at 1.9× the rate of chunks that open with a topical introduction), source authority (Article schema with author and credentials lifts verbatim survival by 1.3×), and lexical distinctiveness (chunks with phrasing the engine cannot easily compress into the answer's voice survive verbatim at 1.5×). Engineering the decision toward verbatim is the highest-leverage downstream investment a chunk-level rewrite makes.