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].
Best Paper Award at DESIRES‘21
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.
TWeb paper on Semantic Table Retrieval
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.
SIGIR’21 contributions
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]
Ivica Kostric joins IAI
Ivica Kostric joins IAI as a PhD student. Ivica will be working on conversational AI and will be supervised by Krisztian Balog. This position is partially funded by Google.
ECIR’22 will be held in Stavanger, Norway
We are very excited to host the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) next year! ECIR’22 is planned to be held as a physical conference (with support for remote attendance) in Stavanger, Norway, which would be the northernmost location in the history of the conference.
Christin Kreutz visits IAI
Christin Kreutz, a PhD student from the University of Trier, Germany, visits us for a period of three months. Christin works on the reviewer coverage problem of conference program committees.