Two Design Axes from Build and Traverse

BUILD TRAVERSE PACK decided at BUILD Q1 · Where does the hierarchy (tree) come from? a hierarchy must exist before anyone can traverse it · BUILD has to get one from somewhere the document's own hierarchy headings become the tree, as-is + free · faithful to the author − only as good as its formatting machine-built (summaries · learned) cluster + summarize (generated) + works on unstructured text − generated: cost · can drift BUILD TRAVERSE PACK decided at TRAVERSE Q2 · Who decides where to go next? at every fork someone must compare the branches with the question and choose score-based traversal (word overlap · embeddings) q 0.92 0.15 the bigger number wins · no thinking + cheap · 0 LLM calls · scales − matches only, cannot reason LLM-guided traversal (reads and reasons) LLM reads both children, then chooses + reasons · follows references − calls per query: slow, costly each method answers both questions → next slide places all seven on this 2×2 map
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