I am Chuan Meng, a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Information Retrieval Lab (IRLab) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), supervisors: Prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke and dr. Mohammad Aliannejadi. Graduation expected in June 2025. During my PhD, I worked as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon, working on LLM-powered conversational agents.

I am interested in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP) with large language models (LLMs), with a particular focus on

• Conversational agents: conversational search, proactive conversational agents, knowledge-grounded dialogue systems
• Neural ranking: LLM-based re-ranking, generative retrieval
• Automatic evaluation: query performance prediction (QPP), LLM-based relevance judgment prediction

My curriculum vitae is available here.

[Google Scholar] [DBLP] [LinkedIn] [Twitter] [ORCID]

Publications

As of March 2025, I have 313 citations (Google Scholar) with an H-index of 10.

I have authored papers published in proceedings/journals, such as SIGIR, EMNLP, CIKM, NAACL, AAAI, ECIR, and TOIS.

1. Query Performance Prediction using Relevance Judgments Generated by Large Language Models
   Chuan Meng, Negar Arabzadeh, Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Maarten de Rijke
   TOIS: ACM Transactions on Information Systems
   [pdf] [code]
2. Zero-Shot and Efficient Clarification Need Prediction in Conversational Search
   Lili Lu, Chuan Meng, Federico Ravenda, Mohammad Aliannejadi and Fabio Crestani
   ECIR 2025: The 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval
   [pdf] [code]
3. Improving the Re-Usability of Conversational Search Test Collections
   Zahra Abbasiantaeb, Chuan Meng, Leif Azzopardi and Mohammad Aliannejadi
   ECIR 2025: The 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval
   [pdf] [code]
4. Self-seeding and Multi-intent Self-instructing LLMs for Generating Intent-aware Information-Seeking Dialogs
   Arian Askari, Roxana Petcu, Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Amin Abolghasemi, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Suzan Verberne
   NAACL 2025: The 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
   [pdf] [code]
5. Generative Retrieval with Few-shot Indexing
   Arian Askari^#, Chuan Meng^#(co-first author), Mohammad Aliannejadi, Zhaochun Ren, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Suzan Verberne
   Submitted to ARR: ACL Rolling Review
   [pdf]
6. Can We Use Large Language Models to Fill Relevance Judgment Holes?
   Zahra Abbasiantaeb, Chuan Meng, Leif Azzopardi, Mohammad Aliannejadi
   LLM4Eval: The First Workshop on Large Language Models (LLMs) for Evaluation in Information Retrieval
   [pdf] [code]
7. Query Performance Prediction for Conversational Search and Beyond
   Chuan Meng
   SIGIR 2024: The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
   [pdf]
8. Ranked List Truncation for Large Language Model-based Re-Ranking
   Chuan Meng, Negar Arabzadeh, Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Maarten de Rijke
   SIGIR 2024: The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
   [pdf] [code]
9. LLM-based Retrieval and Generation Pipelines for TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT) 2023
   Zahra Abbasiantaeb, Chuan Meng, David Rau, Antonis Krasakis, Hossein A. Rahmani, and Mohammad Aliannejadi
   TREC 2023: The Thirty-Second Text REtrieval Conference (Our submitted runs ranked 1st)
   [pdf]
10. Expand, Highlight, Generate: RL-driven Document Generation for Passage Reranking
    Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Chuan Meng, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Suzan Verberne
    EMNLP 2023 (main conference): The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
    [pdf]
11. System Initiative Prediction for Multi-turn Conversational Information Seeking
    Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Maarten de Rijke
    CIKM 2023: The 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
    [pdf] [code]
12. Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conversational Search
    Chuan Meng, Negar Arabzadeh, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Maarten de Rijke
    SIGIR 2023: The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    [pdf] [code]
13. Performance Prediction for Conversational Search Using Perplexities of Query Rewrites
    Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Maarten de Rijke
    QPP++ 2023: Query Performance Prediction and Its Evaluation in New Tasks Workshop co-located with The 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval
    [pdf] [code]
14. Initiative-Aware Self-Supervised Learning for Knowledge-Grounded Conversations
    Chuan Meng, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Tengxiao Xi, and Maarten de Rijke
    SIGIR 2021: The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    [pdf]
15. Conversations Powered by Cross-Lingual Knowledge
    Weiwei Sun^#, Chuan Meng^#(co-first author), Qi Meng, Zhaochun Ren, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, and Maarten de Rijke
    SIGIR 2021: The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    [pdf] [code]
16. DukeNet: A Dual Knowledge Interaction Network for Knowledge-Grounded Conversation
    Chuan Meng, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Weiwei Sun, Zhaochun Ren, Zhaopeng Tu and Maarten de Rijke
    SIGIR 2020: The 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    [pdf] [code]
17. RefNet: A Reference-aware Network for Background Based Conversation
    Chuan Meng, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Christof Monz, Jun Ma, and Maarten de Rijke
    AAAI 2020: The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
    [pdf] [code]

Academic Service

• Workshop organization
  • QPP++2025: Query Performance Prediction and its Applications in the Era of Large Language Models
    Chuan Meng, Guglielmo Faggioli, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Nicola Ferro, and Josiane Mothe
    ECIR 2025: The 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval
    [website] (Will be held from the 6th to the 10th of April 2025 in Lucca, Italy)
• Program committee member
  • SIGIR 2025, 2024
  • ACL 2023
  • EMNLP 2023, 2022, 2021
  • CIKM 2024, 2023, 2022
  • WSDM 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022
  • The Web Conf 2025, 2024
  • COLING 2025, 2022, 2020
  • ECIR 2025, 2024
  • ICTIR 2023
  • ECML/PKDD 2022, 2021
  • SIGKDD 2022
  • AAAI 2021
• ACL Rolling Review (ARR) reviewer 2025
• Journal reviewer,
  • Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
  • Information Processing and Management (IPM)
• External reviewer
  • ICONIP 2020

Teaching & Supervision

• Tutorial organization:
  • Query Performance Prediction: Theory, Techniques and Applications
    Negar Arabzadeh, Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Ebrahim Bagheri
    WSDM 2025: The 18th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
    10th–the 14th March 2025, Hanover, Germany
    [pdf] [slides]
  • Query Performance Prediction: Techniques and Applications in Modern Information Retrieval
    Negar Arabzadeh, Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Ebrahim Bagheri
    SIGIR-AP 2024: The 2nd ACM SIGIR-AP conference
    9th–12th December 2024, Tokyo, Japan
    [pdf] [slides]
  • Query Performance Prediction: From Fundamentals to Advanced Techniques
    Negar Arabzadeh, Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Ebrahim Bagheri
    ECIR 2024: The 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval
    24th–28th March 2024, Glasgow, UK
    [pdf] [slides]
• Teaching assistant:
  • Information Retrieval, 2023, University of Amsterdam; project design and grading
  • Information Retrieval, 2022, University of Amsterdam; project design and grading
  • Information Retrieval, 2020, Shandong University; assignment/project design and grading
  • Natural Language Processing, 2019, Shandong University; assignment/project design and grading
• PhD mentorship (Research-oriented):
  • Lili Lu, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), with Prof. dr. Fabio Crestani

Talks & Presentations

Invited talks:

• Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Information Retrieval
  21 Oct 2024, University of Glasgow
  Host: Iadh Ounis, professor at the University of Glasgow
  [slides] [post]
• Predicting the Right Moment for System Initiative in Mixed-Initiative Conversational Search
  26 Aug 2024, Amazon (London)
  Host: Gabriella Kazai, principal applied scientist at Amazon
  [slides]
• Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Information Retrieval
  14 Aug 2024, Objective, Inc.
  Host: Pablo Mendes, co-founder & CEO at Objective, Inc.
  [slides]
• Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Information Retrieval
  17 Apr 2024, Amazon (Seattle)
  Host: Shervin Malmasi, applied science manager at Amazon
  [slides]
• System Initiative Prediction and Query Performance Prediction for Conversational Information Seeking
  3 Nov 2023, University College London (UCL)
  Host: Xi Wang, lecturer at the University of Sheffield
  [slides] [post]
• Query Performance Prediction for Conversational Search
  18 May 2023, University of Glasgow
  Host: Iadh Ounis, professor at the University of Glasgow
  [slides] [post]

Administration Activities

• Manager for the IRLab LinkedIn account, 2025-present
• Webmaster for the IRLab website, 2023-2024
• Chair for Internal seminars at IRLab, 2023
• Lead organizer of the IRLab BBQ event, 2023

Scholarships & Awards

• Excellent Master’s Thesis of Shandong Province, 2022
• National Scholarship (China), 2020/2016
• Outstanding Graduates of Shandong Province, 2021/2017
• SIGIR Student Travel Grant, 2020
• Scholarship for Outstanding Postgraduate Cadres of Shandong University, 2020/2019
• AAAI Student Scholar Scholarship, 2019
• Academic Scholarship for Master Students of Shandong University, 2019
• Outstanding Students of Shandong Province, 2017

Resources

I have curated the following resources:

• a code repository (over 1,900 visitors) providing scripts for fine-tuning open-source LLMs to generate relevance judgments, within a Python/PyTorch framework
• a code repository (over 2,900 visitors) providing a comprehensive implementation of query performance prediction (QPP) methods, within a unified Python/PyTorch framework.
• a code repository (over 1,100 visitors) offering a comprehensive implementation of ranked list truncation methods, within a unified Python/PyTorch framework.
• a paper reading list (over 260 stars) on knowledge-grounded dialogue systems.

Also, I have contributed to key open-source toolkits in information retrieval, including:

• Pyserini (v0.19.2), a Python toolkit for reproducible information retrieval research.
• Tevatron, a flexible and efficient Python toolkit for training and inference of neural retrieval models.

Education

• October 2021-Present
  • Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence, University of Amsterdam (UvA), The Netherlands
  • Supervisors: Prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke and dr. Mohammad Aliannejadi
• September 2018-June 2021
  • Master in Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, China
  • Supervisors: Prof. dr. Zhumin Chen, dr. Pengjie Ren, and dr. Zhaochun Ren
  • Master’s thesis “Research on Knowledge-Grounded Non-Task-Oriented Conversational System” [pdf]
• September 2014-June 2018
  • Bachelor in Electronic Commerce, Shandong Normal University, China

Work Experience

• August 2024-January 2025
  • Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon, United Kingdom
  • Working on LLM-powered conversational agents
  • Manager: Dr. Gabriella Kazai. Mentor: Dr. Francesco Tonolini.

Contact

• Email: c.meng AT uva.nl