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.
Ivan Sekulić visits IAI
Ivan Sekulić is a third-year PhD student at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. He is working on conversational approaches to information retrieval and will be spending 3 months with us.
Papers accepted at SIGIR’22
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]
IAI outing in Sauda
We spent a couple of days in Sauda discussing research methodology, overall group strategy, and values. We also found a moment to enjoy the beautiful surroundings and the weather while skiing.
Sim4IR workshop summary
Krisztian Balog and former IAI member Shuo Zhang, together with David Maxwell and Paul Thomas, have co-organized a workshop on Simulation for Information Retrieval at SIGIR’21. The summary of the workshop has been published in the December issue of SIGIR Forum [PDF].
Nolwenn Bernard and Weronika Łajewska join IAI
We welcome two new PhD students to our group: Nolwenn Bernard and Weronika Łajewska. Both of them are funded by the Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation (NorwAI) research center and will be contributing to the Language and Personalization work package under Krisztian Balog’s supervision.
IAI at the Conversational Assistance Track at TREC’21
The working paper describing our participation at the TREC 2021 Conversational Assistance Track is now available online.
WI-IAT’21 paper on Diverse Reviewer Suggestion
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.
Vinay Setty receives Innovation Prize
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.
RecSys’21 paper on Conversational Recommender Systems
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].