The Ratio Engine — meaning and structure, indexed together
Two indexes over one corpus: an ontology that knows how law is organised, and a vector space that knows what language means. A question is embedded, swept against every paragraph, gated against the hierarchy, and resolved to the single passage that survives.
The ontology
StructureDoctrines, courts and their hierarchy, and what every later judgment did to the ones before it.
The vector space
MeaningEvery paragraph of every judgment is a point. The question is embedded into the same space, and the field collapses toward what actually answers it.
Resolve
The query is encoded and mapped onto the ontology — doctrine, court, jurisdiction, period.
Retrieve
An approximate nearest-neighbour sweep scores every paragraph vector against the query.
Constrain
Ontology-gated re-ranking drops what cannot count — wrong jurisdiction, outranked, overruled.
Cite
The surviving passage is the only permitted source, so the answer resolves to one paragraph.
Vectors find what sounds right. The ontology decides what counts.
Design concept