Score: 1

RECOR: Reasoning-focused Multi-turn Conversational Retrieval Benchmark

Published: January 9, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.05461v1

By: Mohammed Ali , Abdelrahman Abdallah , Amit Agarwal and more

Potential Business Impact:

Helps computers answer questions by talking and thinking.

Business Areas:
Semantic Search Internet Services

Existing benchmarks treat multi-turn conversation and reasoning-intensive retrieval separately, yet real-world information seeking requires both. To bridge this gap, we present a benchmark for reasoning-based conversational information retrieval comprising 707 conversations (2,971 turns) across eleven domains. To ensure quality, our Decomposition-and-Verification framework transforms complex queries into fact-grounded multi-turn dialogues through multi-level validation, where atomic facts are verified against sources and explicit retrieval reasoning is generated for each turn. Comprehensive evaluation reveals that combining conversation history with reasoning doubles retrieval performance (Baseline .236 $\rightarrow$ History+Reasoning .479 nDCG@10), while reasoning-specialized models substantially outperform dense encoders. Despite these gains, further analysis highlights that implicit reasoning remains challenging, particularly when logical connections are not explicitly stated in the text.

Country of Origin
🇦🇹 Austria

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
36 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Information Retrieval