SemEval-2026 Task 8: MTRAGEval: Evaluating Multi-Turn RAG Conversations

Sara Rosenthal, Vraj Shah, Yannis Katsis, Marina Danilevsky


Abstract
We present the results and findings from SemEval Task 8: MTRAGEval. MTRAGEval measures three Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) subtasks: A. Retrieval, B. Generate, and C. Retrieve+Generate (full RAG) on multi-turn conversations. The task is evaluated using MTRAG-UN, a new benchmark for Multi-Turn RAG focusing on Unanswerable, Underspecified, Non-Standalone, and Unclear Questions. The MTRAGEval task attracted strong participation with 107 registered teams and 92 submissions across all subtasks, and yielded several interesting findings on effective retrieval and query rewriting techniques, the use of ensemble models, and the compounding costs of retrieval errors on downstream generation quality.
Anthology ID:
2026.semeval-1.447
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Debanjan Ghosh, Kai North, Mamoru Komachi
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3673–3690
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.447/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sara Rosenthal, Vraj Shah, Yannis Katsis, and Marina Danilevsky. 2026. SemEval-2026 Task 8: MTRAGEval: Evaluating Multi-Turn RAG Conversations. In Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026), pages 3673–3690, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SemEval-2026 Task 8: MTRAGEval: Evaluating Multi-Turn RAG Conversations (Rosenthal et al., SemEval 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.447.pdf