EvidenT: Building Trustworthy Enterprise Assistants through Evidence Groundedness and Traceability

Anubha Kabra, Katie Jooyoung Kim, Colin Zhiwei Kou, Helene L Sajer, Yimei Fan, Radomir Cisar, Heather Greenhalgh, Gabriel Martinez Vidiri


Abstract
Enterprise AI assistants must produce responses that are verifiable and traceable to source evidence. However, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over heterogeneous enterprise data can suffer from citation drift, unsupported content, and weak source traceability. We present EvidenT (T = Trust + Transparency + Traceability), a lightweight pipeline that verifies extracted evidence against retrieved documents before answer generation, without model retraining. EvidenT combines structured passage extraction with deterministic lexical alignment to filter unsupported content, correct citation drift, and preserve source-span traceability. On approximately 500 real enterprise queries, EvidenT improves gold-source hit rate by an average of 29% over prompting baselines, produces no citations to non-retrieved urls, and achieves near-saturated answer-to-source lexical coverage.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-industry.69
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Pepa Atanasova, Gholamreza Haffari, Minghan Wang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1149–1178
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-industry.69/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anubha Kabra, Katie Jooyoung Kim, Colin Zhiwei Kou, Helene L Sajer, Yimei Fan, Radomir Cisar, Heather Greenhalgh, and Gabriel Martinez Vidiri. 2026. EvidenT: Building Trustworthy Enterprise Assistants through Evidence Groundedness and Traceability. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 1149–1178, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EvidenT: Building Trustworthy Enterprise Assistants through Evidence Groundedness and Traceability (Kabra et al., EMNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-industry.69.pdf