AILS-NTUA at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Evaluating Multi-Turn RAG Conversations

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Main Authors: Athanasiou, Dimosthenis, Lymperaiou, Maria, Filandrianos, Giorgos, Voulodimos, Athanasios, Stamou, Giorgos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Athanasiou, Dimosthenis
Lymperaiou, Maria
Filandrianos, Giorgos
Voulodimos, Athanasios
Stamou, Giorgos
author_facet Athanasiou, Dimosthenis
Lymperaiou, Maria
Filandrianos, Giorgos
Voulodimos, Athanasios
Stamou, Giorgos
contents We present the AILS-NTUA system for SemEval-2026 Task 8 (MTRAGEval), addressing all three subtasks of multi-turn retrieval-augmented generation: passage retrieval (A), reference-grounded response generation (B), and end-to-end RAG (C). Our unified architecture is built on two principles: (i) a query-diversity-over-retriever-diversity strategy, where five complementary LLM-based query reformulations are issued to a single corpus-aligned sparse retriever and fused via variance-aware nested Reciprocal Rank Fusion; and (ii) a multistage generation pipeline that decomposes grounded generation into evidence span extraction, dual-candidate drafting, and calibrated multi-judge selection. Our system ranks 1st in Task A (nDCG@5: 0.5776, +20.5% over the strongest baseline) and 2nd in Task B (HM: 0.7698). Empirical analysis shows that query diversity over a well-aligned retriever outperforms heterogeneous retriever ensembling, and that answerability calibration-rather than retrieval coverage-is the primary bottleneck in end-to-end performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_10524
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AILS-NTUA at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Evaluating Multi-Turn RAG Conversations
Athanasiou, Dimosthenis
Lymperaiou, Maria
Filandrianos, Giorgos
Voulodimos, Athanasios
Stamou, Giorgos
Computation and Language
We present the AILS-NTUA system for SemEval-2026 Task 8 (MTRAGEval), addressing all three subtasks of multi-turn retrieval-augmented generation: passage retrieval (A), reference-grounded response generation (B), and end-to-end RAG (C). Our unified architecture is built on two principles: (i) a query-diversity-over-retriever-diversity strategy, where five complementary LLM-based query reformulations are issued to a single corpus-aligned sparse retriever and fused via variance-aware nested Reciprocal Rank Fusion; and (ii) a multistage generation pipeline that decomposes grounded generation into evidence span extraction, dual-candidate drafting, and calibrated multi-judge selection. Our system ranks 1st in Task A (nDCG@5: 0.5776, +20.5% over the strongest baseline) and 2nd in Task B (HM: 0.7698). Empirical analysis shows that query diversity over a well-aligned retriever outperforms heterogeneous retriever ensembling, and that answerability calibration-rather than retrieval coverage-is the primary bottleneck in end-to-end performance.
title AILS-NTUA at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Evaluating Multi-Turn RAG Conversations
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10524