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arXiv · 2603.10524

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

Dimosthenis Athanasiou·Maria Lymperaiou·Giorgos Filandrianos·Athanasios Voulodimos·Giorgos Stamou
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Abstract

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.

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Dimosthenis Athanasiou, Maria Lymperaiou, Giorgos Filandrianos, Athanasios Voulodimos, Giorgos Stamou. 2026-03-11. AILS-NTUA at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Evaluating Multi-Turn RAG Conversations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10524

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