About the Navigator

This is a retrieval-augmented system: your question is embedded (qwen/qwen3-embedding-4b, 1536-dim, with the same instruction-prefix convention used to embed the documents), matched against policy chunks (structural chunking) restricted to the sources you selected, re-ordered by a cross-encoder reranker (jina-reranker-v2-base-multilingual), and the top excerpts are handed to the generator (deepseek-v4-flash:cloud) with strict instructions to answer only from that text.

• Ground or abstain. If the retrieved text doesn't answer the question, the Navigator says so and declines rather than inventing policy.
• Citations everywhere. Every claim names its document and section or SPG number, labeled school-level or university-level; when sources overlap, each position is presented without asserting legal precedence.
• Your filter is binding. Retrieval is restricted to your source selection inside the database query itself — a deselected corpus is never searched, surfaced, or cited.
• Logged for evaluation. Questions, answers, retrieved passages, and the active source selection are logged to support the published evaluation.

Every claim made about this system's quality is backed by an open, reproducible metric: retrieval accuracy swept across configurations with confidence intervals, answer quality judged against a gold set by an independent model with disclosed rubrics and prompts, adversarial red-teaming, and source-filter integrity tests. Results are published on the reports page as each phase completes, and nothing is shown before real results exist.

Access is restricted to authenticated umich.edu accounts. The Navigator is an unofficial navigation aid built for the School of Social Work community; it does not replace the official policy documents or the responsible offices.