Maarten de Rijke
Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Conversations Based on Search Engine Result Pages
How might we convey the information that is traditionally returned by a search engine in the form of a complex search engine result page (SERP) in a meaningful and natural conversation? In the talk I will start from recent work on so-called background based conversations, where a conversational agent has access to additional background information to help it generate more natural and appropriate responses. Then, I will talk about ongoing work on our next step: SERP-based conversations. I will will explain the task definitions, describe pipelines (subtasks), baselines, datasets, etc. Finally, I will describe the differences between background-based and SERP-based conversations and their relations to other, related tasks. Our work on SERP-based conversations is in its early stages, leaving lots of opportunities for follow-up research.
Based on joint work with Pengjie Ren, Nikos Voskarides, and Svitlana Vakulenko.
Biography
Maarten de Rijke is University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval at the University of Amsterdam. He holds MSc degrees in Philosophy and Mathematics (both cum laude), and a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science. He worked as a postdoc at CWI, before becoming a Warwick Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. He joined the University of Amsterdam in 1998, and was appointed full professor in 2004. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and a recipient of a Pioneer Personal Innovation grant, the Tony Kent Strix Award, the Bloomberg Data Science Research Award, the Criteo Faculty Research Award, the Google Faculty Research Award, the Microsoft PhD Research Fellowship Award, and the Yahoo Faculty and Research Engagement Program Award as well as a large number of NWO grants. He is the director of the newly established Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence and a former director of Amsterdam Data Science.
De Rijke leads the Information and Language Processing Systems group at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam, one of the world’s leading academic research groups in information retrieval. His research focus is at the interface of information retrieval and artificial intelligence, with projects on online and offline learning to rank, on recommender systems, and on conversational search.
A Pionier personal innovational research incentives grant laureate (comparable to an advanced ERC grant), De Rijke has helped to generate over 65MEuro in project funding. With an h-index of 69 he has published over 750 papers, published or edited over a dozen books, is editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, co-editor-in-chief of Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval and of Springer’s Information Retrieval book series, (associate) editor for various journals and book series, and a current and former coordinator of retrieval evaluation tracks at TREC, CLEF and INEX. Recently, he was co-chair for SIGIR 2013, general co-chair for ECIR 2014, WSDM 2017, and ICTIR 2017, co-chair “web search systems and applications” for WWW 2015, short paper co-chair for SIGIR 2015, and program co-chair for information retrieval for CIKM 2015.
The retrieval and language technology developed by De Rijke’s research group is being used by organizations around the Netherlands and beyond, and has given rise to various spin-off initiatives.
