Helene L Sajer
Author directory2026
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
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Anubha Kabra | Katie Jooyoung Kim | Colin Zhiwei Kou | Helene L Sajer | Yimei Fan | Radomir Cisar | Heather Greenhalgh | Gabriel Martinez Vidiri
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
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.