From the Encyclopaedia to the Vector: The Corpus Pipeline as Epistemic Act in Psychoanalytic AI

This essay argues that, in artificial intelligence systems applied to psychoanalytic domains, the quality of the knowledge-acquisition pipeline can weigh as heavily as the language model in determining the quality of the system, and sometimes more. It presents a four-stage pipeline that transforms publicly accessible academic encyclopaedias into a structured vector database: standardised crawling with traceability, hierarchical chunking that preserves the semantic structure of the original text, enrichment through knowledge graphs and fragmented LLM extraction, and local multilingual vectorisation. It documents the Terminology Guard as a protection layer against the terminological poisoning that automatic translation models produce in specialised domains. It proposes four concepts: the pipeline as epistemic act, hierarchical chunking as preservation of meaning, the Terminology Guard as defence against terminological epistemicide, and traceability as the ethical condition of citation.