Achievements

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!

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.

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!

The paper Towards a Formal Characterization of User Simulation Objectives in Conversational Information Access by Nolwenn Bernard and Krisztian Balog received the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at the 14th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR ’24). The paper is available here.

The paper Towards Reliable and Factual Response Generation: Detecting Unanswerable Questions in Information-seeking Conversations by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog has received the Best Short Paper Award at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR ’24). You can read the paper here.

The paper Towards Filling the Gap in Conversational Search: From Passage Retrieval to Conversational Response Generation by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog has received the Best Resource Paper Award at the 31st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM ‘23).

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]

SR-bank’s innovation award for 2020 is awarded to Vinay Setty, co-founder of Factiverse, a spinoff company from UiS/IAI, for developing a software that identifies news that is not true or lacks credibility. See the official announcement at the University of Stavanger’s homepage.

The paper Conversational AI from an Information Retrieval Perspective: Remaining Challenges and a Case for User Simulation by Krisztian Balog has received a Best Paper Award at 2nd International Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES ’21) and is now available online.

Krisztian Balog has received an unrestricted gift from Google, “as part of Google’s growing efforts to support excellent research in academia” to support his work on conversational search, user modeling, transparency, and explainability. The gift will be used towards funding a PhD position, which will be announced soon.