Weronika Łajewska receives NAIS 2025 Dissertation Award

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The Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society (NAIS) has awarded the 2025 Dissertation Award to Weronika Łajewska for her PhD thesis Grounded and Transparent Response Generation for Conversational Information-Seeking Systems, supervised by Krisztian Balog. The thesis develops new methods and evaluation frameworks for conversational systems that can communicate uncertainty, provide evidence for their responses, and help users assess the trustworthiness of generated answers—including GINGER, a modular retrieval-augmented generation framework for grounded and controllable responses. During her PhD, Weronika’s publications earned three Best Paper Awards at SIGIR, ECIR and CIKM.

The award was selected from doctoral theses defended across the broad field of AI in 2024–2025, and was formally presented at the 2026 Scandinavian Conference on AI in Odense on June 16, 2026. Congratulations, Weronika!

UMAP’25 full paper accepted

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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

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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

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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

  • Simulations for Information Access (Sim4IA) workshop, featuring two micro shared tasks
  • Theory and Toolkits for User Simulation in the Era of Generative AI: User Modeling, Synthetic Data Generation, and System Evaluation tutorial (website)

CRS Arena presented at WSDM’25

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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

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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

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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.