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!