The paper Should We Tailor the Talk? Understanding the Impact of Conversational Styles on Preference Elicitation in Conversational Recommender Systems by Ivica Kostric, Krisztian Balog, and Ujwal Gadiraju has been accepted at the 33rd ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP ’25) [PDF].
Best “IR for Good” paper at ECIR’25
The paper FlashCheck: Exploration of Efficient Evidence Retrieval for Fast Fact-Checking by Kevin Nanhekhan, V. Venktesh, Erik Martin, Henrik Vatndal, Vinay Setty and Avishek Anand received the Best “IR for Good” Paper Award at the the 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR ’25). The paper is available here.
Papers at SIGIR’25
Our group has the following papers accepted at SIGIR’25:
- GINGER: Grounded Information Nugget-Based Generation of Responses — short paper by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog [PDF]
- MultiConAD: A Unified Multilingual Conversational Dataset for Early Alzheimer’s Detection — resource paper by Arezo Shakeri, Mina Farmanbar, Krisztian Balog [PDF]
- Navigating Speech Recording Collections with AI-Generated Illustrations — demo paper by Sirina Håland, Trond Karlsen Strøm and Petra Galuščáková
In addition, our group is also involved with the organization of
Mariam Arustashvili joins IAI
We are delighted to welcome Mariam Arustashvili as our new PhD student. Her research will focus on Large Language Models for Recommendations under the supervision of Krisztian Balog. Mariam is funded by NorwAI, the Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation.
CRS Arena presented at WSDM’25
CRS Arena is a platform to benchmark conversational recommender systems in a crowdsourced environment, developed by Nolwenn Bernard, Hideaki Joko, Faegheh Hasibi, and Krisztian Balog. This work has been presented at the 18th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM ’25), in Hannover. Try it out here or have a look at the demo paper.
WSDM’25, ECIR’25 and WWW’25 papers on fact checking
Some recent paper acceptances on fact checking:
- LiveFC: A System for Live Fact-Checking of Audio Streams — short paper at WSDM ’25 by V. Venktesh and Vinay Setty [PDF]
- FlashCheck: Exploration of Efficient Evidence Retrieval for Fast Fact-Checking — “IR for Good” paper at ECIR ’25 by Kevin Nanhekhan, V. Venktesh, Erik Martin, Henrik Vatndal, Vinay Setty and Avishek Anand [PDF]
- Annotation Tool and Dataset for Fact-Checking Podcasts — resource paper at WWW ’25 by Vinay Setty and Adam James Becker [PDF]
- FactIR: A Real-World Zero-shot Open-Domain Retrieval Benchmark for Fact-Checking — resource paper at WWW ’25 by Venktesh V and Vinay Setty [PDF]
Pratuat Amatya joins IAI
We are delighted to welcome Pratuat Amatya as our new PhD student. His research will focus on agent-based fact-checking under the supervision of Vinay Setty. Pratuat’s PhD is funded through an industrial grant from the Norwegian Research Council in collaboration with Factiverse AS.
Top performance at TREC RAG’24
GINGER (Grounded Information Nugget-Based Generation of Responses), our response generation system, achieved the top performance in the Automated Generation task at TREC RAG’24, based on automatic evaluation with AutoNuggetizer. Check out the track’s initial results and the preprint of our paper describing GINGER!
Gabriel Iturra-Bocaz joins IAI
We welcome Gabriel Iturra-Bocaz as our new PhD student, who will focus his research on LLMs for information retrieval, under the supervision of Petra Galuscakova.
PhD position in Large Language Models for Recommendation
We have a PhD position in Large Language Models for Recommendation, funded by the NorwAI research-based innovation center. See the details on jobbnorge. Application deadline is Oct 31.