We have the honor and privilege to welcome Jian-Yun Nie, Professor at the University of Montreal and specialist in Information retrieval and natural language processing.

You are cordially invited to the seminar he will give on May 17th.

Creating the Right Query in Conversational Information Retrieval, Jian-Yun Nie

Wednesday May 17, 2023, Auditorium IRIT, 118 rte de Narbonne, Metro A Univ. Fr. Sabatier - 10 a.m.

The user interface is rapidly evolving thanks to advances in natural language processing. It is transforming from a point interface where each request is isolated, to a conversational interface. A query can then depend on previous rounds of conversation. In this presentation, we address the question: How can the query be enriched in the context of a conversation? A first approach consists in selecting the relevant context to enrich the query. A second approach exploits a generative language model to formulate a new query and generate a potential response to do the expansion. We show that these approaches improve the performance of conversational IR. These examples show a strong link between IR and language models for conversation, but also a need for more studies on dedicated approaches to conversational IR.

 Jian-Yun Nie is a professor at Université de Montréal and holder of a Canada Research Chair in Natural Language Processing. He works in the RALI laboratory (Applied Research in Computational Linguistics). His research covers various topics in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing. In particular, he has developed several IR models for integrating research knowledge and for cross-linguistic and multilingual IR. He also works on the recommender system, the question answer and the dialogue. Jian-Yun Nie regularly publishes in leading conferences and journals. His publications are often cited by peers. He regularly acts as a member of the conference program committee such as SIGIR, CIKM, ACL, WWW and as president of conferences, notably SIGIR and CORIA. He has won several best paper awards at conferences. He was elected a member of the SIGIR Academy in 2022. He is currently a guest professor by J. Mothe at IRIT in the SIG team.