Chunhua Hu
Author directory2026
SAFER: Speech-First Auditable Follow-Up with Evidence-Gated Routing
Boyu Zhang | Juntao Su | Zihua Wang | Chunhua Hu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Boyu Zhang | Juntao Su | Zihua Wang | Chunhua Hu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Post-implant telephone follow-up requires an agent to respond naturally, complete a structured standard operating procedure (SOP), and avoid unsupported medical advice within the same call. We present SAFER, a live speech-first system for Chinese neuromodulation follow-up that exposes three capabilities in one demonstration: real-time voice interaction with barge-in, an inspectable in-call SOP trace, and guarded handling of unscripted medical or device questions. In the dual-lane architecture, user-facing speech does not wait for asynchronous state commitment, while questions assigned to the guarded branch receive fixed non-generative deflection phrases; callback-eligible clinical or safety subclasses also create a human-follow-up record. Controlled studies report a median end-to-end voice latency of 1.07 seconds, a 0.983 transcript-level completeness-accuracy field score, and 23/30 joint routing, correctness, coverage, and grounding successes on independently expert-reviewed synthetic gold-ANSWER queries. The hosted demo lets reviewers conduct a call and inspect the evolving in-call record, available evidence text, latency, and patient-facing routing behavior. These results characterize a simulated prototype; they do not establish clinical safety or real-world robustness.