We describe our SemEval-2026 Task 8 Subtask A system, which focuses on evaluating and improving the retrieval aspect of multi-turn Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) conversations. We implement a training-free fusion approach that combines three distinct query representations to retrieve documents independently. The results from these three views are pooled and reranked using a MonoT5 cross-encoder. Our findings demonstrate that this fusion approach consistently outperforms single-strategy baselines, revealing that optimal retrieval strategies vary significantly at the query level, and establishing multi-query fusion as a baseline for multi-turn RAG systems.

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing the cultural competence of large language models (LLMs) in Persian. Existing Persian cultural benchmarks rely predominantly on multiple-choice formats and English-centric metrics that fail to capture Persian’s morphological complexity and semantic nuance. Our framework introduces a Persian-specific short-answer evaluation that combines rule-based morphological normalization with a hybrid syntactic and semantic similarity module, enabling robust soft-match scoring beyond exact string overlap. Through systematic evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source models across three culturally grounded Persian datasets, we demonstrate that our hybrid evaluation improves scoring consistency by +10 compared to exact-match baselines by capturing meaning that surface-level methods cannot detect. Our human evaluation further confirms that the proposed semantic similarity metric achieves higher agreement with human judgments than LLM-based judges. We publicly release our evaluation framework, providing the first standardized benchmark for measuring cultural understanding in Persian and establishing a reproducible foundation for cross-cultural LLM evaluation research.