ECIR’24 and CHIIR’24 papers on conversational search

Some recent papers acceptances on conversational search:

  • Towards Reliable and Factual Response Generation: Detecting Unanswerable Questions in Information-seeking Conversations — short paper at ECIR’24 by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog [PDF]
  • Estimating the Usefulness of Clarifying Questions and Answers for Conversational Search — short paper at ECIR’24 by Ivan Sekulic, Weronika Łajewska, Krisztian Balog, and Fabio Crestani [PDF]
  • Towards Self-Contained Answers: Entity-Based Answer Rewriting in Conversational Search — full paper at CHIIR’24 by Ivan Sekulic, Krisztian Balog, and Fabio Crestani [PDF]

Petra Galuscakova joins IAI

Associate Professor Petra Galuscakova joins IAI as a faculty member. Petra will work on an intersection of information retrieval and natural language processing. She is interested in providing robust access strategies for complex search scenarios, such as cross-language retrieval and speech retrieval. Petra holds a PhD from Charles University in Prague, after which she spent some time at the University of Maryland and Université Grenoble-Alpes.

CIKM’23 contributions

Our group has two contributions accepted at CIKM’23:

  • Towards Filling the Gap in Conversational Search: From Passage Retrieval to Conversational Response Generation — resource paper by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog [PDF]
  • Tutorial on User Simulation for Evaluating Information Access Systems — tutorial by Krisztian Balog and ChengXiang Zhai [website]

IAI outing and hackathon

We spent two days in the Grand Hotell in Egersund working on a framework for Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKGs). The outing was devoted to discussions, hands-on coding, and group activities. The PKG ecosystem has been defined in our recently submitted paper. Apart from hard work, we made use of beautiful weather and enjoyed a hike to Trollpikken. Photos from the outing can be found here.