I am Chuan Meng, a postdoctoral researcher at EdinburghNLP, working with Dr. Jeff Dalton. My position is funded by the Turing AI Fellowships.

I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in June 2025, supervised by Prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke (ACM Fellow) and dr. Mohammad Aliannejadi. My doctoral dissertation, titled “Optimizing Agentic Workflows for Information Access”, is available here. During my PhD, I worked as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon, working on LLM-powered conversational agents.

My research lies at the intersection of agentic AI, information retrieval (IR), and natural language processing (NLP), with a focus on cost-effective long-horizon agents for information seeking, such as deep research agents.

My curriculum vitae is available here.

[Google Scholar] [DBLP] [LinkedIn] [X (formerly Twitter)] [ORCID]

Selected Publications

As of September 2026, I have published 30+ papers, with 800+ citations (Google Scholar) and an h-index of 17. I have published at venues such as SIGIR, ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, NAACL, CIKM, ECIR, and TOIS.

According to the ICORE 2026 conference ranking, 11 of my papers are at CORE A* venues and 5 at CORE A venues.

1. Revisiting Text Ranking in Deep Research
   Chuan Meng, Litu Ou, Sean MacAvaney, and Jeff Dalton
   SIGIR 2026 (CORE A*): The 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
   [pdf] [code]
2. Agent and Tool Search: Foundations, Techniques, and Open Challenges
   Bin Wu, Hossein A. Rahmani, To Eun Kim, Arastun Mammadli, Shuofei Qiao, Xiao Fu, Varsha Ramineni, Xiaoyu Zhang, Chuan Meng, George Drayson, Anu Chowdhury, Jerome Ramos, Abdine Maiga, and Emine Yilmaz
   Under review
   [pdf]
3. Re-Rankers as Relevance Judges
   Chuan Meng, Jiqun Liu, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Fengran Mo, Jeff Dalton, and Maarten de Rijke
   Under review
   [pdf] [code]
4. Toward Exploring Mixed-Initiative Conversation Generation Based on Community Question Answering
   Lili Lu, Pranav Kasela, Federico Ravenda, Chuan Meng, Gabriella Pasi, and Fabio Crestani
   TOIS (JIF 11.2, JCR Q1): ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 44(5), 1–29, 2026
   [pdf]
5. Generative Retrieval with Few-shot Indexing
   Arian Askari^#, Chuan Meng^#(co-first author), Mohammad Aliannejadi, Zhaochun Ren, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Suzan Verberne
   ECIR 2026 (CORE A): The 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval
   [pdf]
6. Towards Adaptive Personalized Conversational Information Retrieval
   Fengran Mo, Yuchen Hui, Yuxing Tian, Zhaoxuan Tan, Chuan Meng, Zhan Su, Kaiyu Huang, Jian-Yun Nie
   CIKM 2025 (CORE A): The 34th ACM International conference on Information and Knowledge Management
   [pdf]
7. UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations
   Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng, Xin Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Kelong Mao, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
   ACL 2025 (CORE A*): The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
   [pdf]
8. Bridging the Gap: From Ad-hoc to Proactive Search in Conversations
   Chuan Meng, Francesco Tonolini, Fengran Mo, Nikolaos Aletras, Emine Yilmaz, and Gabriella Kazai
   SIGIR 2025 (CORE A*): The 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
   [pdf] [code]
9. Query Performance Prediction using Relevance Judgments Generated by Large Language Models
   Chuan Meng, Negar Arabzadeh, Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Maarten de Rijke
   TOIS (JIF 11.2, JCR Q1): ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 43(4), 1-35, 2025 (Selected as one of five featured articles)
   [pdf] [code]
10. SOLID: 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]
11. Zero-Shot and Efficient Clarification Need Prediction in Conversational Search
    Lili Lu, Chuan Meng, Federico Ravenda, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Fabio Crestani
    ECIR 2025 (CORE A): The 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval
    [pdf] [code]
12. Improving the Re-Usability of Conversational Search Test Collections
    Zahra Abbasiantaeb, Chuan Meng, Leif Azzopardi and Mohammad Aliannejadi
    ECIR 2025 (CORE A): The 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval
    [pdf] [code]
13. Query Performance Prediction for Conversational Search and Beyond
    Chuan Meng
    SIGIR 2024 (CORE A*): The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    [pdf]
14. Ranked List Truncation for Large Language Model-based Re-Ranking
    Chuan Meng, Negar Arabzadeh, Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Maarten de Rijke
    SIGIR 2024 (CORE A*): The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    [pdf] [code]
15. Expand, Highlight, Generate: RL-driven Document Generation for Passage Reranking
    Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Chuan Meng, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Suzan Verberne
    EMNLP 2023 (CORE A*): The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
    [pdf]
16. System Initiative Prediction for Multi-turn Conversational Information Seeking
    Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Maarten de Rijke
    CIKM 2023 (CORE A): The 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
    [pdf] [code]
17. Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conversational Search
    Chuan Meng, Negar Arabzadeh, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Maarten de Rijke
    SIGIR 2023 (CORE A*): The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    [pdf] [code]
18. 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 (CORE A*): The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    [pdf]
19. 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 (CORE A*): The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    [pdf] [code]
20. 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 (CORE A*): The 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    [pdf] [code]
21. 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 (CORE A*): The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
    [pdf] [code]

Academic Service

So far, I have organized a workshop, served on the program committees of 13 major venues (including as a senior program committee member), reviewed for 3 journals, and served as a moderator for arXiv.

• 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
    6–10 April 2025, Lucca, Italy
    [paper] [website]
• Senior Program committee member
  • CIKM 2026
• Program committee member
  • SIGIR 2026, 2025, 2024
  • ACL 2023
  • EMNLP 2023, 2022, 2021
  • CIKM 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022
  • WSDM 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022
  • The Web Conf 2026, 2025, 2024
  • COLING 2025, 2022, 2020
  • SIGIR-AP 2026
  • ECIR 2026, 2025, 2024
  • ICTIR 2025, 2023
  • ECML/PKDD 2022, 2021
  • SIGKDD 2022
  • AAAI 2021
• ACL Rolling Review (ARR) reviewer 2025
• Journal reviewer,
  • Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Information Processing and Management (IP&M)
• arXiv, Moderator (cs.IR), February 2026-present

Teaching & Supervision

• Tutorial organization: so far, I have organized 7 tutorials, as the first speaker in 3 of them and the second speaker in the other 4.
  • Agentic Search: Foundations, Optimization, and Long-Horizons
    Chuan Meng, Litu Ou, Sean MacAvaney, and Jeff Dalton
    CIKM 2026: The 35th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (upcoming)
    7 November 2026, Rome, Italy
  • Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the Age of Agents
    Chuan Meng, Fengran Mo, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Jeff Dalton, and Jian-Yun Nie
    WWW 2026: The ACM Web Conference 2026
    30 June 2026, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
    [paper] [slides] [website]
  • Conversational Search: Foundations, Large Language Models, and Agents
    Chuan Meng, Fengran Mo, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Jeff Dalton, and Jian-Yun Nie
    ECIR 2026: The 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval
    29 March–2 April 2026, Delft, The Netherlands
    [paper] [slides] [website]
  • Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the LLM Era
    Fengran Mo, Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and Jian-Yun Nie
    SIGIR 2025: The 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    13–17 July 2025, Padua, Italy
    [paper] [slides] [website]
  • 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
    10–14 March 2025, Hanover, Germany
    [paper] [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
    9–12 December 2024, Tokyo, Japan
    [paper] [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
    24–28 March 2024, Glasgow, UK
    [paper] [slides]
• Lecturing: so far, I have delivered 3 lectures (1 course lecture and 2 guest lectures) in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Netherlands.
  • Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the Agent Era (guest lecture, about 50 MSc and final-year undergraduate students), The University of Edinburgh, March 2026
    Host: Alexandra Birch
    [slides]
  • Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the LLM Era (guest lecture, about 40 undergraduate students), University of Massachusetts Amherst, October 2025
    Host: Razieh Negin Rahimi
    [slides]
  • Recommender Systems (course lecture, about 50 students), University of Amsterdam, June 2025
    Course design and delivery of the lecture “Sequential and Large Language Model-based Recommender Systems”
    [slides]
• Teaching assistance:
  • Information Retrieval (about 60 students), University of Amsterdam, 2022-2023; project design and grading
  • Information Retrieval (about 60 students), Shandong University, 2020; assignment and project design, and grading
  • Natural Language Processing (about 70 students), Shandong University, 2019; assignment and project design, and grading
• PhD mentoring:
  • Paul Owoicho, The University of Edinburgh, with Dr. Jeff Dalton
  • Lili Lu, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), with Prof. dr. Fabio Crestani

Talks & Presentations

So far, I have delivered 10 invited talks in academia (the Royal Society, UCL, King’s College London, the University of Glasgow, the University of Sheffield, and the China Conference on Information Retrieval) and industry (Amazon in Seattle and London, and Objective, Inc.).

Invited talks:

• The Role of Information Retrieval in Deep Research
  16 Aug 2026, Young Scholars Forum at the 32nd China Conference on Information Retrieval (CCIR 2026)
  Host: Information Retrieval Technical Committee, Chinese Information Processing Society of China
  [slides]
• The Role of Information Retrieval in Deep Research
  24 Jun 2026, King’s College London (KCL)
  Host: Yulan He, professor at King’s College London
• Revisiting Text Ranking in Deep Research
  5 Mar 2026, University of Sheffield
  Host: Nikolaos Aletras, professor at the University of Sheffield
• Revisiting Text Ranking in Deep Research
  3 Mar 2026, the Royal Society
• 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 LinkedIn account of IRLab (Information Retrieval Lab, University of Amsterdam), 2025
• Webmaster for the IRLab website, University of Amsterdam, 2023-2024
• Chair for internal seminars at IRLab, University of Amsterdam, 2023
• Lead organizer of the IRLab BBQ event, University of Amsterdam, 2023

Awards & Scholarships

• First places in international evaluations
  • 1st place among 84 open-source agent systems from 9 countries (below 100B parameters), BrowseComp-Plus deep research leaderboard, organised by the University of Waterloo, Carnegie Mellon University, and others, 2026
  • 1st place in document retrieval among 24 systems from 7 countries, TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT), US National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2023
• Scholarships and 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

My open-source code and data have attracted over 800 GitHub stars across all my repositories and over 14,000 Hugging Face downloads, and my code has been reused by companies including Snowflake and Dataminr.

Representative resources I have curated include:

• a resource repository on Hugging Face (over 14,000 downloads) providing the passage corpus, pre-built retriever indexes, and agent execution trajectories for deep research.
• a code repository (over 200 stars) providing scripts for text ranking in deep research, within a Python/PyTorch framework
• a code repository (over 100 stars) providing scripts for fine-tuning open-source LLMs to generate relevance judgments, within a Python/PyTorch framework
• a code repository (over 110 stars) providing a comprehensive implementation of query performance prediction (QPP) methods, within a unified Python/PyTorch framework.
• a code repository (over 50 stars) offering a comprehensive implementation of ranked list truncation methods, within a unified Python/PyTorch framework.
• a paper reading list (over 250 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-June 2025
  • 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]

Work Experience

• September 2025 – Present
  • Postdoctoral Researcher (Research Associate) at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
  • Funded by Turing AI Fellowships
  • Supervisor: Dr. Jeff Dalton.
• August 2024 – January 2025
  • Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon, United Kingdom
  • Working on proactive conversational agents
  • Manager: Dr. Gabriella Kazai. Mentor: Dr. Francesco Tonolini.

Contact

• Email: chuan.meng AT ed.ac.uk