CS Department Colloquium: Gabriella Pasi (University of Milano-Bicocca)
Personalized search: contributions to neural approaches and to evaluation
In the past few years there has been an increasing interest in the application of Deep Learning techniques to various Information Retrieval tasks, among which Personalized Search.
In this lecture, I will present an overview of the research undertaken in my research lab, related to two main issues: the definition of neural approaches to personalise search, and the definition of new datasets for its evaluation. In relation to the former aspect three contributions will be synthesized; the first one is an approach to user modeling in the context of Product Search. By this approach multiple representations of the user preferences are defined, which are combined and exploited in a re-ranking approach. A second
contribution addresses the issue of query-aware user modeling, by proposing a way to decide which user-related information is useful for a specific query and if personalization is required. Finally, a personalized approach to query expansion will be presented. On the
evaluation the definition of datasets for personalized search, particularly, in the field of academic search will be discussed.
Bio: Gabriella Pasi is Professor and Director of the Department of Computer Science, Systems and Communication of the University of Milano-Bicocca (Milano, Italy), where she leads the Information and Knowledge Representation, Retrieval, and Reasoning (IKR3) research lab.
Her main research interests are related to Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, User Modelling, and Social Media mining (in particular, concerning the access to and assessment of genuine information related to health). She has published more than 250 papers, and she has served as Program Co-Chair at several conferences, among which: ACM-SIGIR 2023 (Reproducibility Track), ACM ICTIR 2022, CLEF 2022, ECIR 2019, ACM-SIGIR 2014 (Short Papers). She has been Senior Track Chair (Information Retrieval Track) at ACL 2022, and Chair of the Test of Time Award committee at ECIR 2021. She has delivered Keynote talks at several international conferences. She was a panelist at the Panel Women in IR at SIGIR 2022. She is Associate Editor of several international journals, among which ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems and the International Journal of Data Science and Analytics. She received an IEEE Service Award and she is Fellow of the International Fuzzy System Association. She has been both coordinator and PI of several projects (the more recent two Marie Curie International Training/Doctoral Networks). She has been member of the Panel of Experts for Computer Science (PE6) of the European Research Council, for both Starting and Consolidator Grants. Since 2021 she is co-director of the ELLIS Unit in Milan (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems).