SCOPE: Memory Conflict as a Question-Time Relation

Conversational memory accumulates statements that revise, qualify, or contradict earlier ones. Which statement matters depends on a question that may not yet have been asked. Resolving conflicts when memory is written can discard a distinction a later question needs. We ask what memory should decide before that question arrives. Keeping the dialogue preserves these distinctions, but a bounded reader still needs to find and select the evidence relevant to each question. We introduce SCOPE (Slot-indexed Conversational Organization for Provenance-linked Evidence), which groups extracted statements by subject and attribute while retaining links to their original dialogue. At query time, these groups guide access to source turns for an answering model to interpret. On MemConflict, a benchmark of questions over conflicting conversations, SCOPE answers more accurately overall and on questions about change over time than lexical retrieval with the same evidence selection and answering steps. It also exceeds the evaluated memory systems in overall accuracy; both results hold under a second LLM judge. These findings support separating memory organization from question-dependent interpretation of competing evidence.