I am Chuan Meng (“孟川” in Chinese), a third-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.

Interested in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), with a particular focus on

• conversational search,
• query performance prediction (QPP),
• large language models (LLMs) and
• knowledge-grounded dialogue systems.

My curriculum vitae is available here.

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

Publications

As of April 2024, I have 176 citations (Google Scholar) with an H-index of 5.

I have authored papers published in proceedings, such as SIGIR, EMNLP, CIKM, and AAAI.

1. Chuan Meng. Query Performance Prediction for Conversational Search and Beyond. The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024) (to appear).
2. Chuan Meng, Negar Arabzadeh, Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Maarten de Rijke. Ranked List Truncation for Large Language Model-based Re-Ranking. The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024). [pdf] [code]
3. Chuan Meng, Negar Arabzadeh, Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Maarten de Rijke. Query Performance Prediction using Relevance Judgments Generated by Large Language Models. arXiv:2404.01012. [pdf] [code]
4. Arian Askari, Roxana Petcu, Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Amin Abolghasemi, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Suzan Verberne. Self-seeding and Multi-intent Self-instructing LLMs for Generating Intent-aware Information-Seeking dialogs. Under review for the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024). [pdf] [code]
5. Zahra Abbasiantaeb, Chuan Meng, David Rau, Antonis Krasakis, Hossein A. Rahmani, and Mohammad Aliannejadi. LLM-based Retrieval and Generation Pipelines for TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT) 2023. The Thirty-Second Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2023) (Our submitted runs ranked 1st). [pdf]
6. Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Chuan Meng, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Suzan Verberne. Expand, Highlight, Generate: RL-driven Document Generation for Passage Reranking. The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023, main conference). [pdf]
7. Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Maarten de Rijke. System Initiative Prediction for Multi-turn Conversational Information Seeking. The 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2023). [pdf] [code]
8. Chuan Meng, Negar Arabzadeh, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Maarten de Rijke. Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conversational Search. In SIGIR 2023: 46th international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023). [pdf] [code]
9. Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Maarten de Rijke. Performance Prediction for Conversational Search Using Perplexities of Query Rewrites. Query Performance Prediction and Its Evaluation in New Tasks Workshop co-located with The 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (QPP++ 2023). [pdf] [code]
10. Chuan Meng, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Tengxiao Xi, and Maarten de Rijke. Initiative-Aware Self-Supervised Learning for Knowledge-Grounded Conversations. The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2021). [pdf]
11. Weiwei Sun^#, Chuan Meng^#(co-first author), Qi Meng, Zhaochun Ren, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, and Maarten de Rijke. Conversations Powered by Cross-Lingual Knowledge. The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2021). [pdf] [code]
12. Chuan Meng, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Weiwei Sun, Zhaochun Ren, Zhaopeng Tu and Maarten de Rijke. DukeNet: A Dual Knowledge Interaction Network for Knowledge-Grounded Conversation. The 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2020). [pdf] [code]
13. Chuan Meng, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Christof Monz, Jun Ma, and Maarten de Rijke. RefNet: A Reference-aware Network for Background Based Conversation. The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020). [pdf] [code]

Academic Service

• Program committee member
  • SIGIR 2024
  • ACL 2023
  • EMNLP 2023, 2022, 2021
  • CIKM 2024, 2023, 2022
  • WSDM 2024, 2023, 2022
  • WWW 2024
  • ECIR 2024
  • ICTIR 2023
  • COLING 2022
  • ECML/PKDD 2022, 2021
  • SIGKDD 2022
  • AAAI 2021
  • COLING 2020
• 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:
  • Negar Arabzadeh, Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Ebrahim Bagheri. Query Performance Prediction: From Fundamentals to Advanced Techniques. The 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024). [pdf] [slides]
• Teaching assistant:
  • Information Retrieval, 2022–2023, 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

Talks & Presentations

Invited talks:

• 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

Resource

• I curated a paper reading list focused on knowledge-grounded dialogue systems, garnering over 250 stars.

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]

Contact

• Email: c.meng AT uva.nl