Extreme Classification for Answer Type Prediction in Question Answering by Vinay Setty has been accepted at Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’23) as a short paper.
IAI
Simone Borg Bruun visits IAI
Simone Borg Bruun is a third-year PhD student affiliated with the University of Copenhagen and Alka Forsikring. She is working on recommender systems for the insurance domain. Her research interests include learning from sparse and dynamic user actions, multimodal learning, and explainability. Simone will be spending 2 months with us.
UserSimCRS paper presented at WSDM’23
UserSimCRS is an extensible user simulation toolkit for evaluating conversational recommender systems developed by Jafar Afzali, Krisztian Balog, Nolwenn Bernard, Aleksander Drzewiecki, and Shuo Zhang. This work has been presented at the 16th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM ’23), in Singapore. Have a look at the demo paper or the toolkit for more details.
IAI at the Conversational Assistance Track at TREC’22
The paper describing our participation at the TREC 2022 Conversational Assistance Track is now available here.
ECIR’23 reproducibility paper on Conversational Search Systems
The paper From Baseline to Top Performer: A Reproducibility Study of Approaches at the 2021 TREC Conversational Assistance Track by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog has been accepted at the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’23). A preprint is available here.
Trond Linjordet defends PhD thesis
Today, Trond Linjordet has successfully defended his PhD thesis: A Critical Look at the Evaluation of Knowledge Graph Question Answering. His opponents were Stefano Mizzaro (University of Udine, Italy) and Maria Maistro (University of Copenhagen, Denmark).
Congratulations Dr. Linjordet!
[Thesis][Flickr photo album]
IAI outing and hackathon
We spent a day in Utstein Monastery Hotel in Mosterøy working on bringing back to life and planning further development of our conversational movie recommender system, the IAI MovieBot. The outing was devoted to discussions, hands-on coding, and group activities. The original IAI MovieBot is described in a CIKM’20 demo paper [PDF]. Photos from the outing can be found here.
DAGFiNN demo at RecSys’22
DAFiNN is a conversational conference assistant that has been developed by members of our group, Ivica Kostric, Krisztian Balog, Nolwenn Bernard, Weronika Łajewska, together with students at the University of Stavanger. This work has been demonstrated at the 16th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys‘22) last week, in Seattle, USA. Have a look at the dagfinn.ai website, the demo paper, or the video with a walk-through of its capabilities.
ECIR’22 in Stavanger, Norway
We hosted the 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’22)! It was not only the northernmost ECIR ever but also the first major IR conference in a hybrid format. ECIR’22 was a great success, both in the number of attendees (378 in total, of which 185 in person) and their level of satisfaction. We are glad that we could play a role in facilitating this. The report on the conference is now available online, as well as our Flickr photo album.