Chuan Meng
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.
Additionally, I am currently working as an applied scientist intern at Amazon, working on Rufus (Amazon’s generative shopping assistant).
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
- 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 September 2024, I have 228 citations (Google Scholar) with an H-index of 7.
I have authored papers published in proceedings, such as SIGIR, EMNLP, CIKM, and AAAI.
- Query Performance Prediction using Relevance Judgments Generated by Large Language Models
Chuan Meng, Negar Arabzadeh, Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Maarten de Rijke
Under review for TOIS: ACM Transactions on Information Systems
[pdf] [code] - Generative Retrieval with Few-shot Indexing
Arian Askari#, Chuan Meng#(co-first author), Mohammad Aliannejadi, Zhaochun Ren, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Suzan Verberne
Under review for EMNLP 2024: The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
[pdf] - 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
Under review for EMNLP 2024: The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
[pdf] [code] - 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] - 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] - 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] - 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] - 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] - 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] - 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] - 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] - 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] - 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] - 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] - 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
- Program committee member
- SIGIR 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 2024
- ICTIR 2023
- ECML/PKDD 2022, 2021
- SIGKDD 2022
- AAAI 2021
- Journal reviewer,
- Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
- Information Processing and Management (IPM)
- External reviewer
- ICONIP 2020
- Webmaster for the IRLab website, 2023-present
- Chair for Internal seminars at IRLab, 2023
Teaching & Supervision
- Tutorial organization:
- 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:
- 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) [slides]
- Query Performance Prediction for Conversational Search, 18 May 2023, University of Glasgow [slides]
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 1,200 visitors) providing scripts for fine-tuning open-source LLMs to generate relevance judgments, within a Python/PyTorch framework
- a code repository (over 2,200 visitors) providing a comprehensive implementation of query performance prediction (QPP) methods, within a unified Python/PyTorch framework.
- a code repository (over 700 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.
I also contributed to Pyserini, a Python toolkit for reproducible information retrieval research.
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-Present
- Applied scientist intern at Amazon, United Kingdom
- Working on Rufus, Amazon’s generative AI-powered shopping assistant
- Manager: Dr. Gabriella Kazai.
Contact
- Email: c.meng AT uva.nl