TRACE: Accountable Agentic Retrieval for Source Discovery in Digital Archives
Quick summary
arXiv:2609.19897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Historical archives pose a difficult retrieval problem for retrievalaugmented generation systems: documents are OCR-degraded, heterogeneous across genres and sources, and require strong source traceability for scholarly and institutional use. We introduce TRACE, a training-free agentic retrieval framework designed for accountable source discovery over historical corpora. The system was developed in the context of DECIDON, an interdisciplinary project on the circulation of political discourse between parliamentary debates and the press during the
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2609.19897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Historical archives pose a difficult retrieval problem for retrievalaugmented generation systems: documents are OCR-degraded, heterogeneous across genres and sources, and require strong source traceability for scholarly and institutional use.
- We introduce TRACE, a training-free agentic retrieval framework designed for accountable source discovery over historical corpora.
- The system was developed in the context of DECIDON, an interdisciplinary project on the circulation of political discourse between parliamentary debates and the press during the
Why it matters
“TRACE: Accountable Agentic Retrieval for Source Discovery in Digital Archives” illustrates how changes in the AI ecosystem can affect products, workflows and user expectations together. Its lasting significance depends on measurable adoption, cost and safety outcomes.

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