Entity-Oriented Search book

Entity-Oriented SearchI am pleased to announce that my Entity-Oriented Search book is now available online.

This open access book covers all facets of entity-oriented search—where “search” can be interpreted in the broadest sense of information access—from a unified point of view, and provides a coherent and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. It represents the first synthesis of research in this broad and rapidly developing area. Selected topics are discussed in-depth, the goal being to establish fundamental techniques and methods as a basis for future research and development. Additional topics are treated at a survey level only, containing numerous pointers to the relevant literature. A roadmap for future research, based on open issues and challenges identified along the way, rounds out the book.

PhD position in Conversational AI (re-opened)

The position that has been advertised before has not been filled and is re-opened. See this page for the application instructions (remember to specify topic #9 Conversational AI for information access and retrieval as your preference). Application deadline: September 30, 2018.

Joining Google (for a year)

Today, I’ve started by sabbatical at Google, London, UK, where I’ll be working as a Staff Visiting Faculty Researcher on conversational recommendations. I still maintain a 20% position at the University of Stavanger to continue supervising my PhD students.

Table generation and retrieval

Tables are powerful and versatile tools for organizing and presenting data. Tables may be viewed as complex information objects, which summarize existing information in a structured form. Therefore, for many information needs, returning tables as search results may be more helpful to users than serving a ranked list of items (documents or entities). We have a line of work, with Shuo Zhang, centered around utilizing (relational) tables as the unit of retrieval (published at WWW’18 and SIGIR’18). I presented our research at this interesting intersection of entity retrieval and data search in my keynote at the DATA:SEARCH’18 workshop at SIGIR’18 (slides are here).

PhD position in Conversational AI

The University of Stavanger invites applications for a fully funded PhD position.

Intelligent personal assistants and chatbots (such as Siri, Cortana, the Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa) are being used increasingly more for different purposes, including information access and retrieval. These conversational agents differ from traditional search engines in several important ways. They enable more naturalistic human-like interactions, where search becomes a dialog between the user and the machine. Unlike in traditional search engines, where a user-issued query is answered with a search result page, conversational agents can respond in a variety of ways, for example, asking questions back to the user for clarification.

The successful candidate will work on the design, development, and evaluation of conversational search systems. In particular, the candidate is expected to employ and develop deep learning techniques for understanding natural language requests and generating appropriate responses.

The candidate is required to have a background in machine learning or information retrieval.
For detailed information about the PhD position and the application process, please see here. Remember to specify topic #7 Conversational AI for information access and retrieval as your preference.

Application deadline: February 27, 2018