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Reviewing Contradictions

When your organization's documents disagree with each other — for example, two sources describe the same process differently or define a term in conflicting ways — Mention flags these as contradictions. Pending contradictions are surfaced alongside Steering (the Knowledge view on the web, the Steering screen on mobile), where admins review each conflict and decide which version is correct.

What is a Contradiction?

A Contradiction is a pair of facts, extracted from your source documents, that Mention's AI has judged to be logically in conflict. Each contradiction includes:

  • The two conflicting facts — shown side by side with references to the source documents they came from
  • A severity score (1–10) — how strongly the two facts conflict
  • Reasoning — an AI-generated explanation of why the facts are considered contradictory

Contradictions only surface when two facts are about the same Concept. If two unrelated documents make different claims about different topics, that is not a contradiction — only overlapping claims about the same subject are flagged.

How detection works

Mention groups the facts it has extracted by the Concepts they mention, then evaluates pairs of facts within each group for logical conflict. Candidate pairs go through a second verification step — a stronger model re-checks each one and keeps only genuine contradictions, filtering out facts that merely describe different aspects of the same thing, restate each other in different words, or where one is a more specific case of the other. Only pairs that pass this check are stored as contradictions for you to review.

Only facts that come from different kinds of source are compared. A "kind" is the combination of integration and content type — for example, a Notion document, a GitHub readme, or a Google Meet transcript. Two facts drawn from the same kind of source (say, two Notion documents) are assumed to be internally consistent and are skipped, while facts from different kinds (a Notion document vs. a GitHub readme, or a Google document vs. a Google meeting transcript) are checked against each other.

Detection runs in three ways:

  • Automatically after onboarding — the first detection pass runs when your organization completes setup
  • On a recurring schedule — Mention periodically re-scans for new contradictions as your source content changes
  • Manually — admins can trigger a detection pass from the Knowledge view (Steering on mobile) at any time

Triggering detection consumes credits. See Understanding Credits for details.

Reviewing contradictions

Open Steering:

  • Web — the Knowledge view. Pending contradictions appear in the Mention's questions sidebar next to the question-and-correction chat, under the Conflicts group, each showing both facts, their severity, and the AI reasoning. (The same sidebar's Unanswered group lists questions Mention couldn't answer — see Answering Unanswered Questions.)
  • Mobile — open the Conflicts tab in the bottom tab bar. The tab shows a badge with the number of pending contradictions.

For each contradiction you have two options:

  • Resolve — pick the fact you believe is correct. The other fact (the "loser") is suppressed in future context.
  • Discard — dismiss the contradiction as a false positive. Both facts remain in use.

You can resolve or discard contradictions individually or in bulk. To move quickly through a backlog, Auto-resolve (in the web sidebar and the mobile screen) stages a resolution for every conflict it can rank, using whichever rule matches how you trust your sources:

  • Newest source wins — keep the fact whose source was updated most recently (newer information tends to be more accurate).
  • Prefer docs — keep the fact backed by written documentation.
  • Prefer chat — keep the fact from conversations, transcripts, and calls.

Under every rule, a side backed by a Mention-authored source — a correction, report, or feature brief — wins outright, and conflicts the rule can't confidently rank (missing dates, an exact tie, or both sides matching) are left untouched for you to decide. The staged picks appear like any other decision, so you can review them before submitting.

What resolution does

When you resolve a contradiction by picking a winning fact, the losing fact is excluded from context the next time Mention generates an Article, SOP, or Grounded Q&A answer that involves those facts. This means:

  • Generated content becomes more accurate because conflicting information is removed
  • Members see consistent answers grounded in the version you chose as correct

Unresolved (pending) contradictions leave both facts in play. Until you review them, members may encounter content that reflects both versions.