User Simulation tutorial at AAAI’24 and WWW’24

Together with ChengXiang Zhai, we will be giving our user simulation tutorial at AAAI’24 and WWW’24, customized to the respective audiences. The AAAI’24 edition adopts a broader perspective of user simulation for evaluating an interactive AI system and focuses more on simulation algorithms and techniques that are well connected with various sub-fields of AI, such as machine learning and agent-based systems. In contrast, the WWW’24 edition emphasizes more on applications of user simulation for evaluating Web information access systems, including click modeling and the application of simulation techniques in e-commerce.

Tutorial on User Simulation @CIKM’23

I’m excited to share that, together with the esteemed ChengXiang Zhai, we’ll be presenting a tutorial on “User Simulation for Evaluating Information Access Systems” at the upcoming 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM ’23) in Birmingham, UK, in October. This half-day tutorial is based on our upcoming FnTIR book. We look forward to sharing our insights and also hope for feedback that could shape the final version of the book. Visit our companion website usersim.ai for more info.

User Simulation book draft available

I’m excited to share the draft of our book, co-authored by ChengXiang Zhai, User Simulation for Evaluating Information Access Systems: http://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08550

This book focuses on providing a thorough understanding of user simulation techniques designed specifically for evaluation purposes. We systematically review both general frameworks and specific models and algorithms for simulating user interactions with search engines, recommender systems, and conversational assistants.

We invite feedback on this first version. If you have suggestions, comments, pointers, etc. reach out to me in email!

Event reports

The June 2022 issue of SIGIR Forum reports on two events that I co-organized:

SIGIR’22 contributions

The following papers got accepted at SIGIR’22:

  • Analyzing and Simulating User Utterance Reformulation in Conversational Recommender Systems” — full paper with Shuo Zhang and Mu Chun Wang [PDF]
  • On Natural Language User Profiles for Transparent and Scrutable Recommendation” — perspectives paper with Filip Radlinski, Fernando Diaz, Lucas Dixon, and Ben Wedin [PDF]
  • Would You Ask it that Way? Measuring and Improving Question Naturalness for Knowledge Graph Question Answering” — resource paper with Trond Linjordet [PDF]

Additionally, together with Alessandro Piscopo, Oana Inel, Sanne Vrijenhoek, and Martijn Millecamp, I’ll be co-organizing a workshop on Measuring Quality of Explanations in Recommender Systems [PDF].

update May 31: pre-prints added