Research Summary: Governed Sovereign RAG for Public Administration: Tripartite Epistemic Routing, Facet-Guided Clarification, and Deterministic Numeric Verification in Citizen Services

A research deployment on the official government portal of Tlaxcala, Mexico, demonstrates a sovereign Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system tailored for public administration citizen services. The system spans 1,143 administrative procedures and 924 decoupled offices, resolving operational tensions among data sovereignty restrictions, underspecified citizen inquiries, and zero-tolerance regulatory standards against invented fees. The architecture employs tripartite epistemic routing, facet-guided clarification, and deterministic verification to maintain jurisdictional and procedural precision.

Why it matters

This initiative matters because it establishes a repeatable blueprint for public sector entities to adopt conversational AI without violating strict sovereign data protections or exposing citizens to costly generative hallucinations. By proving that deterministic guardrails and epistemic routing can function at state scale, it decouples public automation from unregulated commercial cloud models. Consequently, public agencies can preserve legal certainty while significantly reducing administrative friction at digital service desks.

Key insights

• Public administration digital assistants face structural friction between data sovereignty mandates prohibiting commercial cloud solutions and strict zero-tolerance thresholds for factual errors such as invented administrative fees.
• The evaluated deployment across the State of Tlaxcala portal (tlaxcaladigital.gob.mx) manages 1,143 government procedures and a decoupled directory of 924 public offices.
• Interaction governance relies on a tripartite epistemic gate that arbitrates user inquiries into answering directly (SPECIFIC), initiating clarification dialogues (CLARIFY), or managing boundary conditions.
• Deterministic numeric verification and sovereign hosting are leveraged to enforce legal certainty and regulatory compliance in citizen-facing digital services.

Source

arXiv — Computers and Society — https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36561