Publications

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.

The paper describing our participation at the TREC 2022 Conversational Assistance Track is now available here.

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.

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.

Our group has three papers accepted at SIGIR’22:

• Analyzing and Simulating User Utterance Reformulation in Conversational Recommender Systems — full paper by former IAI member Shuo Zhang, Mu Chun Wang, and Krisztian Balog [PDF]
• Would You Ask it that Way? Measuring and Improving Question Naturalness for Knowledge Graph Question Answering — resource paper by Trond Linjordet and Krisztian Balog [PDF]
• SparCAssist: A Model Risk Assessment Assistant Based on Sparse Generated Counterfactuals — demo paper by Zijian Zhang, Vinay Setty, and Avishek Anand [PDF]

The working paper describing our participation at the TREC 2021 Conversational Assistance Track is now available online.

Diverse Reviewer Suggestion for Extending Conference Program Committees by Christin Katharina Kreutz, Krisztian Balog, and Ralf Schenkel has been published at 20th IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT’21) as a full paper. This work is the result of Christin’s research visit at IAI, earlier this year.

The paper Soliciting User Preferences in Conversational Recommender Systems via Usage-Related Questions by Ivica Kostric, Krisztian Balog, and Filip Radlinski has been published as a late breaking result paper at the 15th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ‘21) [PDF].

The paper Semantic Table Retrieval Using Keyword and Table Queries by Shuo Zhang and Krisztian Balog has been published in ACM Transactions on the Web and is now available online.

We got the following papers accepted at SIGIR’21:

• On Interpretation and Measurement of Soft Attributes for Recommendation by Krisztian Balog, Filip Radlinski, and Alexandros Karatzoglou as a full paper [PDF]
• Simulating User Satisfaction for the Evaluation of Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems by Weiwei Sun, Shuo Zhang, Krisztian Balog, Zhaochun Ren, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, and Maarten de Rijke as a resource paper [PDF]
• Conversational Entity Linking: Problem Definition and Datasets by Hideaki Joko, Faegheh Hasibi, Krisztian Balog, and Arjen P. de Vries as a resource paper [PDF]
• POINTREC: A Test Collection for Narrative-Driven Point of Interest Recommendation by Jafar Afzali, Aleksander Mark Drzewiecki, and Krisztian Balog as a resource paper [PDF]
• Sim4IR: The SIGIR 2021 Workshop on Simulation for Information Retrieval Evaluation by Krisztian Balog, David Maxwell, Paul Thomas, and Shuo Zhang as a workshop [PDF]