coherence

Definition

Whether a text hangs together — no contradictions, no drifting topic, no characters or premises silently swapped partway through. It is scored separately from factuality: a passage can be internally consistent and still false, or accurate but disjointed. Coherence is also broader than cohesion, which concerns surface links between adjacent sentences; coherence is about the logic of the whole.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: MerchantBench — Can an LLM Agent Run an Online Store for a Year? Why It Earns Only 27.3% of What Humans DoMerchantBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Long-Term Coherence in E-Commerce Operations