Sifei Meng


2026

Multi-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is challenging due to evolving user intent, conversational noise, and strict context limits. We propose a training-free hybrid retrieval pipeline for SemEval-2026 Task 8 that combines dense and sparse retrieval with controlled query rewriting and cross-encoder reranking. Our system achieves 0.5453 nDCG@5 on the official test set of Task A, ranking 3rd out of 38 teams and outperforming the strongest baseline (0.4795). For Task C, we reuse the Task A retrieved documents in a lightweight generation pipeline based on the official prompt, achieving 0.5312 (harmonic mean of quality and faithfulness) and ranking 15th out of 29 teams. All retrieval components are open-source, while rewriting and generation use LLM APIs. Code and scripts are available on GitHub (https://github.com/mengsifei/MultiturnRAG).