I am an assistant professor at IRLab (formerly known as ILPS), the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. I obtained my Ph.D. in the Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. During my Ph.D., I spent four months visiting CIIR at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. Before my Ph.D., I completed my MSc degree in the Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technologies at Tehran Polytechnic, Tehran, Iran.

My Ph.D. topic was on modeling user information needs on mobile devices. I studied this problem in three different settings. Therefore, I had the chance to explore multiple directions in Information Retrieval (IR), namely, recommender systems, unified (meta) search, and conversational systems. I intend to continue working mainly on conversational search system during my post-doctoral at UvA while exploring various areas related to IR, machine learning, and NLP.

Organizational duties and activities

• I will attend the SIGIR-AP conference in person in Tokyo. I will give a tutorial on Query Performance Prediction (QPP) on the first day of the conference and will end the conference with a keynote at the workshop on User Modelling in Conversational Information Retrieval (UM-CIR).
• I will give a keynote at FIRE on LLM-based evaluation.
• Attending the Interactive Information Access event in Paris, where I will give an invited talk on LLM-based evaluation of interactive IR systems.
• Giving a lecture on LLMs and IR Evaluation at the 15th European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR 2024) (July 2024).
• Organizing the 15th European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR 2024) (July 2024).
• Joined Program Committee of Bachelor Program in AI (OCAI), Informatics Institute (IvI), University of Amsterdam, (June 2024).
• Giving a tutorial on query performance prediction at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), (March 2024).
• Tutorial Co-chair of the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), (March 2024).
• Giving a talk on "LLMs for Data Augmentation and User Simulation" at ISIR, Sorbonne University (February 2024).
• Visiting Laure Soulier and Benjamin Piwowarski at ISIR, Sorbonne University for one week (February 2024).
• Joining Pierre Erbacher's PhD Committee on the topic of "Proactive Models for Open-domain Conversational Search" (February 2024).
• Co-teaching MSc. course at UvA on Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning, (November-December 2023).
• Giving an invited talk at the CIIR Talk Series on "Data Augmentation and User Simulation using Large Language Models" [YouTube Video] (October 2023).
• Giving a lecture on Conversational Search at the Autumn School 2023: Information Retrieval and Information Foraging (September 2023).
• Teaching undergrad course at UvA on Information Retrieval (IR0), (September-October 2023).
• Lab Co-Chair of Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2023), (September 2023).
• Program Co-Chair of The 9th ACM SIGIR / The 13th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2023), co-located with SIGIR 2023 at Taipei, Taiwan (July 2023).
• Teaching undergrad course at UvA on Information Retrieval (IR0), (September-October 2022).
• Co-organizing NeurIPS Contest on Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment (IGLU) for the second year.
• Co-organizing the TREC Conversational Assistant (CAsT) track -- main organizer in the mixed-initiative subtask.
• Co-organizing the Dutch-Belgian IR (DIR) workshop 2021 1/2. For more information visit here.
• Co-organizing WSDM Cup on Cross-Market Item Recommendation. For more information visit the challenge's homepage.
• Six Invited lectures as part of the following courses in the Netherlands: IR0, IR2, IIS, AML, IR course at Radboud University, and SIKS.
• Co-organizing NeurIPS Contest on Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment (IGLU). Click here for more info.
• Co-organizing RecSys Workshop on Cross-Market Item Recommendation (XMRec). Click here for more info.
• PC member of SIGIR 2021, ACL 2021, ICTIR 2021, CIKM 2021, EMNLP 2021, ECIR 2022, and WSDM 2022.
• Teaching undergrad course Applied Machine Learning at UvA (April-May 2021).
• Invited talk on Mixed-Initiative Conversational Systems at IvI, UvA (Feb. 2021).
• Two invited lectures at the Information Retrieval (IR1) course at UvA (March 2021).
• Co-organizer of the 1st Workshop on Mixed-Initiative ConveRsatiOnal Systems (MICROS) co-located with ECIR 2021.
• Co-organizer of the 5th Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) co-located with ENMLP 2020.
• Challenge chair of ConvAI3: Clarifying Questions for Open-Domain Dialogues (ClariQ) co-located with SCAI@ENMLP2020.
• Invited lecture at the Applied Machine Learning course at UvA (November 2020).
• Co-lecturer of a proposed course at the Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR) 2020.
• Two invited lectures at the Information Retrieval (IR1) course at UvA (February 2020).
• Student grant co-chair of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2019).
• Local Co-organizer of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2019).
• Represented students of Europe and Africa between 2017-109 as an ACM SIGIR Student Liaison.
• One-week course on Introduction to Recommender Systems at the Document Representation Summer School in La Rochelle, France, 2019.
• Invited lecture at the Data Analytics course at USI (April 2019).
• Invited lecture at the Information Retrieval course at UMass Amherst (October 2018).
• Publicity chair of the 8th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR) 2017.
• Local co-organizer of the DBTA Workshop on Life Logging and Long-Term Digital Preservation 2015.

Data

• XMarket (New!) XMarket is a cross-market prodcut recommendation data, crawled from Amazon. The data is publicly available and can be found here. We are also organizing a shared task as a WSDM Cup challenge, called XMRec on the same topic. For more information, visit XMRec WSDM Cup homepage.
• ClariQ (New!) ClariQ is the SCAI Workshop data challenge on conversational search clarification. The challenge instructions and data is publicly available here. More details and analysis can be found in our paper. Also, more information about the challenge and the leaderboard can be found on ConvAI homepage.
• ConvKeyConvKey contains a set of informative keywords extracted from news articles and mixed-initiative conversations, used for improved document ranking in conversational search. The data is publicly available here. More details and analysis can be found in our paper.
• LSApp LSApp is a large dataset of sequential mobile app usage, consisting of ~600K app usage records of ~300 users. LSApp is a complementary collection to ISTAS where we also collect sequential app usage events of the users. During the study, we asked the participants to report their mobile searches using uSearch as soon as they conducted the search. In the meantime, we collected their app usage statistics with their consent. The data createdtion and stats are described in our TOIS paper.
• CAsTUR CAsTUR consists of a set of relevance labels that we collected on conversational utterances of the TREC CAsT 2019. We aimed to identify the relevant conversational turns in a conversation as context of an utterance. The data is publicly available here. More details and analysis can be found in our CHIIR 2020 paper.
• ANTIQUE ANTIQUE is an open-domain non-factoid question answering benchmark, collected from diverse categories of Yahoo! Answers.. You can find more details on the collection in our ECIR 2020 paper. ANTIQUE is publicly available here.
• Qulac We have released Qulac, the data collection we created as part of our SIGIR paper, Qulac: a dataset on asking Questions for Lack of Clarity in open-domain information-seeking conversations.. You can find more details on the collection here.
• ISTAS We have released the source code of the app as well as the data collection we created as part of our CIKM paper, ISTAS: a collection of mobile cross-app search queries. You can find more details on the collection here.
• UniMobile We have released the data collection we created as part of our SIGIR paper, UniMobile: a collection of mobile cross-app search queries. You can find more details on the collection here.
• TREC-CS We have released the data collection that we crawled and used for our participations in the TREC Contextual Suggestion track. You can find more details on the data collection and how to gain access to it here.

Code

• OMIT (New!) We have released the source code of OMIT: Fair Ranking with Outlier, which is described in our WSDM'22 paper.
• FOREC (New!) We have released the source code of FOREC: A Cross-Market Recommendation System, which is described in our CIKM'21 paper and is evaluated on our XMarket data.
• MIMICS-EL-Benchmark We have released the source code and trained models of user engagement level prediction on the MIMICS dataset. We have described our model and published its results in our ECIR'21 paper.
• STACP We have released the source code of STACP: Local Geographical based Logistic Matrix Factorization Model for POI Recommendation, as part of our ECIR'20 paper.
• LGLMG We have released the source code of LGLMG: Local Geographical based Logistic Matrix Factorization Model for POI Recommendation, as part of our AIRS'19 paper.
• Omicron We have released the source code of Omicron. We used this app to conduct a user study to understand user behavior in context in our recent publication. Please visit Omicron Github repo for more info.
• uSearch We have released the source code of uSearch. We used this app to collect in situ cross-app queries in our recent publication. Please visit uSearch Github repo for more info.

Publications

2022

• SIGIR'22 "Understanding User Satisfaction with Task-oriented Dialogue Systems", C. Siro, M. Aliannejadi, M. de Rijke, International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Madrid, Spain, 2022. [Preprint]
• SIGIR'22 "Experiments on Generalizability of User-Oriented Fairness in Recommender Systems", H. A. Rahmani, M. Naghiaei, M. Dehghan, M. Aliannejadi, International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Madrid, Spain, 2022. [Code]
• ACM TOIS "Users Meet Clarifying Questions: Toward a Better Understanding of User Interactions for Search Clarification", J. Zou, M. Aliannejadi, E. Kanoulas, M. S. Pera, Y. Liu ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), ACM. [PDF]
• ECIR'22 "Exploiting Document-based Features for Clarification in Conversational Search", I. Sekulic, M. Aliannejadi, F. Crestani, European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Stavanger, Norway, 2022.
• ECIR'22 "Towards Building Economic Models of Conversational Search", L. Azzopardi, M. Aliannejadi, E. Kanoulas, European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Stavanger, Norway, 2022.
• WSDM'22 "Evaluating Mixed-initiative Conversational Search Systems via User Simulation", I. Sekulic, M. Aliannejadi, F. Crestani, International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 2022.
• WSDM'22 "Understanding and Mitigating the Effect of Outliers in Fair Ranking", F. Sarvi, M. Huess, M. Aliannejadi, S. Schelter, M. de Rijke International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 2022. [Preprint][Code]
• ACM TOIS "A Systematic Analysis on the Impact of Contextual Information on Point-of-Interest Recommendation", S. Rahmani, M. Aliannejadi, M. Baratchi, F. Crestani, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), ACM. [Preprint][Code][Data][Website]
• IP&M "Leveraging Social Influence based on Users Activity Centers for Point-of-Interest Recommendation", K. S. Hosseinzadeh, S. Rahmani, M. Afsharchi, M. Aliannejadi, Information Processing & Management (IP&M), Elsevier. [Preprint][Code]
• CHIIR'22 "Have a Clue! The Effect of Visual Cues on Children's Search Behavior in the Classroom", M. Landoni, M. Aliannejadi, T. Huibers, E. Murgia, M. Pera, ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), 2022

2021

• EMNLP'21 "Building and Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue Corpora with Clarifying Questions", M. Aliannejadi, J. Kiseleva, A. Chuklin, J. Dalton, M. Burtsev, Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, 2021. [Preprint] [Data and code]
• CIKM'21 "Analysing Mixed Initiatives and Search Strategies during Conversational Search", M. Aliannejadi, L. Azzopardi, H. Zamani, E. Kanoulas, P. Thomas, N. Craswell, ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Queensland, Australia, 2021. [Preprint] [Code and Data (coming soon)]
• CIKM'21 "Cross-Market Product Recommendation", H. Bonab, M. Aliannejadi, A. Vardasbi, E. Kanoulas, J. Allan, ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Queensland, Australia, 2021. [Preprint][Website][WSDM Cup]
• ACM TOIS "Context-Aware Target Apps Selection and Recommendation for Enhancing Personal Mobile Assistants", M. Aliannejadi, H. Zamani, F. Crestani, W.B. Croft, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 2021. [Preprint][Data: ISTAS][Data: LSApp]
• ICTIR'21 "Towards Facet-Driven Generation of Clarifying Questions for Conversational Search", Ivan Sekulic, M. Aliannejadi, F. Crestani, International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR),, 2021. [PDF][Code and Data]
• FQAS'21 "The Impact of User Demographics and Task Types on Cross-App Mobile Search", M. Aliannejadi, F. Crestani, T. Huibers, M. Landoni, E. Murgia, M. Pera, International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems (FQAS), Bratislava, Slovakia, 2021. [PDF]
• IIR'21 "Keyword Extraction for Improved Document Retrieval in Conversational Search", O. Borisov, M. Aliannejadi, F. Crestani, Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR), Bari, Italy, 2021. [PDF] [Data]
• Soft Comput. "Ensemble Classification for Intrusion Detection via Feature Extraction Based on Deep Learning", M. Yousefnezhad, J. Hamidzadeh, M. Aliannejadi, Springer Soft Computing, 2021.
• DESIRES'21 "Getting to Know You: Search Logs and Expert Grading to Define Children's Search Roles in the Classroom", M. Landoni, T. Huibers, M. Aliannejadi, E. Murgia, M. Pera, Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES), Bari, Italy, 2021.
• ECIR'21 "User Engagement Prediction for Clarification in Search", I. Sekulic, M. Aliannejadi, F. Crestani, European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Lucca, Italy, 2021. [Preprint][Code]
• CHIIR'21 "The Children's Perspective on How Emojis Help Them to Recognise Relevant Results: Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words?", M. Aliannejadi, M. Landoni, T. Huibers, E. Murgia, M. Pera, ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), 2021. [PDF]
• ECCE'21 "Somewhere over the Rainbow: Exploring the Sense of Children for Relevance", M. Landoni, T. Huibers, E. Murgia, M. Aliannejadi, M. Pera, European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, Siena, Italy, 2021. [PDF]

2020

• SCAI'20 "ConvAI3: Generating Clarifying Questions for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems (ClariQ)", M. Aliannejadi, J. Kiseleva, A. Chuklin, J. Dalton, and M. Burtsev, Workshop Search-Oriented Conversational AI, 2020. [PDF] [Data][Leaderboard]
• TREC'20 "Longformer for MS MARCO Document Re-ranking Task", I. Sekulic, M. Aliannejadi, A. Soleimani, and F. Crestani, Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), Gathersburg, USA, 2020. [Preprint] [Code]
• ICTIR'20 "Analysing the Effect of Clarifying Questions on Document Ranking in Conversational Search", A. Krasakis, M. Aliannejadi, N. Voskarides, and E. Kanoulas, International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), Stavenger, Norway, 2020. [PDF]
• epiDAMIK'20 "A Canine Census to Develop Public Policy", M. Apa, M. Faini, M. Aliannejadi, and M. Pera, Workshop on Epidemiology meets Data Mining and Knowledge discovery (epiDAMIK), San Diego, USA, 2020. [PDF]
• CIRCLE'20 "Say it with Emojis: Co-designing Relevance Cues for Searching in the Classroom", M. Aliannejadi, M. Landoni, T. Huibers, E. Murgia, M. Pera, Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities in Europe (CIRCLE), Samatan, Gers, France, 2020. [PDF]
• CHIIR'20 "Harnessing Evolution of Multi-Turn Conversations for Effective Answer Retrieval", M. Aliannejadi, M. Chakraborty, E. A. Ríssola, and F. Crestani, ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2020. [Preprint] [Data]
• CHIIR'20 "A Tool for Conducting User Studies on Mobile Devices", L. Costa, M. Aliannejadi, and F. Crestani, ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2020. [PDF][Code]
• ECIR'20 "Beyond Modelling: Understanding Mental Disorders in Online Social Media", E. A. Ríssola, M. Aliannejadi, and F. Crestani, European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Lisbon, Portugal, 2020. [PDF]
• ECIR'20 "Joint Geographical and Temporal Modeling based on Matrix Factorization for Point-of-Interest Recommendation", H. A. Rahmani, M. Aliannejadi, M. Baratchi, and F. Crestani, European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Lisbon, Portugal, 2020. [PDF] [Code]
• ECIR'20 "ANTIQUE: A Non-Factoid Question Answering Benchmark", H. Hashemi, M. Aliannejadi, H. Zamani, and W. B. Croft, European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Lisbon, Portugal, 2020. [Preprint] [Data]

2019

• AIRS'19 "LGLMF: Local Geographical based Logistic Matrix Factorization Model for POI Recommendatio", H. A. Rahmani, M. Aliannejadi, S. Ahmadian, M. Baratchi, M. Afsharchi, Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference (AIRS), Hong Kong, China, 2019. [PDF] [Code]
• ICTIR'19 "Category-Aware Location Embedding for Point-of-Interest Recommendation", H. A. Rahmani, M. Aliannejadi, R. Mirzaei Zadeh, M. Baratchi, M. Afsharchi, and F. Crestani, International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), Santa Clara, California, 2019. [PDF]
• ICTIR'19 "Incorporating Hierarchical Domain Information to Disambiguate Very Short Queries", H. R. Bonab, M. Aliannejadi, J. Foley, and J. Allan, International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), Santa Clara, California, 2019. [PDF] [Data]
• SIGIR'19 "Asking Clarifying Questions in Open-Domain Information-Seeking Conversations", M. Aliannejadi, H. Zamani, F. Crestani, and W. B. Croft, International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Paris, France, 2019. [PDF] [Data] [Slides] [Presentation]
• IEEE TKDE "A Joint Two-Phase Time-Sensitive Regularized Collaborative Ranking Model for Point of Interest Recommendation", M. Aliannejadi, D. Rafailidis, and F. Crestani, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE). [Preprint]
• CHIIR'19 "Understanding Mobile Search Task Relevance and User Behaviour in Context", M. Aliannejadi, M. Harvey, L. Costa, M. Pointon, and F. Crestani, ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), Glasgow, Scotland, UK, 2019. [Preprint][Code]

2018

• CIKM'18 "In Situ and Context-Aware Target Apps Selection for Unified Mobile Search", M. Aliannejadi, H. Zamani, F. Crestani, and W. B. Croft, International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Turin, Italy, 2018. [PDF][Data][Code]
• ICTIR'18 "A Collaborative Ranking Model with Multiple Location-based Similarities for Venue Suggestion", M. Aliannejadi, D. Rafailidis, and F. Crestani, International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), Tianjin, China, 2018. [PDF]
• ACM TOIS "Personalized Context-Aware Point of Interest Recommendation", M. Aliannejadi and F. Crestani, ACM Transactions on Information Systems. [PDF]
• SIGIR'18 "Target Apps Selection: Towards a Unified Search Framework for Mobile Devices", M. Aliannejadi, H. Zamani, F. Crestani, and W. B. Croft, International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, 2018. [PDF][Data]
• SoAPS'18 "Venue Suggestion Using Social-Centric Scores", M. Aliannejadi and F. Crestani, Workshop on Social Aspects in Personalization and Search (SoAPS) at ECIR'18, Grenoble, France, 2018. [PDF]

2017

• SIGIR'17 "A Cross-Platform Collection for Contextual Suggestion", M. Aliannejadi, I. Mele, and F. Crestani, International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Tokyo, Japan, 2017. [PDF]
• SIGIR'17 "Venue Appropriateness Prediction for Personalized Context-Aware Venue Suggestion", M. Aliannejadi and F. Crestani, International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Tokyo, Japan, 2017. [PDF]
• ECIR'17 "Personalized Keyword Boosting for Venue Suggestion based on Multiple LBSNs", M. Aliannejadi, D. Rafailidis, and F. Crestani, European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, 2017 (long presentation). [PDF]
• ACM SAC'17 "Personalized Ranking for Context-Aware Venue Suggestion", M. Aliannejadi, I. Mele, and F. Crestani, ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (ACM SAC), Marrakesh, Morocco, 2017. [PDF]

2016 and before

• TREC'16 "Venue Appropriateness Prediction for Contextual Suggestion", M. Aliannejadi, I. Mele, and F. Crestani, Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), Gaithersburgh, MD, USA, 2016. (Top 1 group in Contextual Suggestion Track, oral presentation) [PDF][Slides]
• AIRS'16 "User Model Enrichment for Venue Recommendation", M. Aliannejadi, I. Mele, and F. Crestani, Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference (AIRS), Beijing, China, 2016. [PDF][Slides]
• TREC'15 "University of Lugano at TREC 2015: Contextual Suggestion and Temporal Summarization Tracks", M. Aliannejadi, S. A. Bahrainian, A. Giachanou, and F. Crestani, Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), Gaithersburgh, MD, USA, 2015. (Top 1 group in Contextual Suggestion Track, oral presentation) [PDF][Slides]
• ALTW'14 "Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Conditional Random Fields For Spoken Language Understanding Using Unaligned Data", M. Aliannejadi, M. Kiaeeha, Sh. Khadivi, and S. Shiry Ghidary, Autsralasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTW), Melbourne, Australia, 2014. [PDF]
• Elsevier ASC'14 "Improved churn prediction in telecommunication industry using data mining techniques", A. Keramati, R. Jafari-Marandi, M. Aliannejadi, I. Ahmadian, M. Mozaffari, and U. Abbasi, Elsevier Journal of Applied Soft Computing (Elsevier ASC), Elsevier, vol. 24, pages 994 -- 1012, 2014. [PDF]
• AISP'13 "Discriminative Spoken Language Understanding Using Statistical Machine Translation Alignment Methods", M. Aliannejadi, Sh. Khadivi, S. Shiry Ghidary, and M. H. Bokaei, International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Signal Processing (AISP), Tehran, Tehran, Iran, 2013. [PDF]

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• Semantic Scholar My Semantic Scholar profile.
• DBLP List of my publications on DBLP.