The Information Access & Artificial Intelligence (IAI) research group is part of the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering at the University of Stavanger. Our mission is to build novel information retrieval and web mining solutions for next generation search engines and intelligent systems, using cutting edge machine learning and AI. We are at the forefront of the international research scene and publish regularly at top conferences, such as SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, CIKM, and ECIR.
Our current projects can be broadly classified into the following areas:
- Semantic search and intelligent assistance (entities and knowledge graphs, semistructured data retrieval, tables, task-based search, and conversational search and recommendation)
- Evaluation methodology (living labs)
- Neural IR (representation learning, learning from sparsely labeled data)
- Web mining (text and graph mining with applications to social media and news media, scalability, fake news detection, and fact checking)
- Explainability and transparency
We mostly deal with big (text, semi-structured, and graph) data. However, it is not just the scale of data that intrigues us. Users interact with systems and we can observe those interactions. Thus, we are also interested in the interaction with AI—understanding how people and machine engage in conversations. Our research combines data-driven approaches with human-centered design.