Two Views, One Voice: Evidence-Grounded Conversational Music Recommendation

Traditional conversational recommenders entangle retrieval and response generation within a single text interface, so exact entity cues fade as the dialogue’s intent evolves, which compromises explanation credibility. We address this within the ACM RecSys Challenge 2026, which mandates both top-20 ranking and evidence-grounded response generation. This paper presents the third-place solution by team “swyoo” for the Blind-B industry track. We decouple retrieval and response into separate pipelines connected strictly via ranked tracks and metadata. Retrieval combines a hybrid lexical-dense pool for exact matching with a task-adapted pool driven by fine-tuned Qwen 8B adapters. Candidates are calibrated via LightGBM, then routed to an evidence-grounded propose-assign-select (PAS) framework to structure responses. This system also ranked second on the explanation-quality leaderboard in the final blind evaluation. Our findings demonstrate that: (i) isolating retrieval and response preserves both catalog cues and fluid intent; (ii) structuring generation via explicit evidence assignment supports this near-best-in-class explanation quality under the official LLM judge.