About Me!
My name is Zahra, and I am currently a second-year Ph.D. student at the Information Retrieval Lab (IRLab) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), working under the supervision of Dr. Mohammad Aliannejadi. I earned my M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence, specializing in Question Answering systems, and my B.Sc. in Software Engineering, both from Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT).
The topic of my Ph.D. is Conversational Search and Recommendation. I have co-organized the interactive Knowledge Assistant Track (iKAT) at TREC for two years, aiming to advance personalized conversational search systems. Over the past two years, my work has spanned various aspects of conversational search, including the development of proactive simulators, the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) for evaluation, and improving retrieval performance for complex information needs in conversational search.
- Conversational Search
- Information Retrieval
- Personalized Search
- Large Language Models
- Evaluation of Conversational Search Systems
- Natural Language Processing
- Question Answering Systems
My curriculum vitae is available here.
News
[2024-Dec]: Our paper got accepted at ECIR 2025.
[2024-Dec]: Our paper got accepted at CHIIR 2025.
[2024-Dec]: Presented our work at EMTCIR workshop of SIGIR-AP 2024, in Tokyo.
[2024-Nov]: Our team ranked 1st at iKAT TREC 2024.
[2024-Oct]: Our paper got accepted at the EMTCIR workshop, SIGIR-AP 2024.
[2024-Oct]: Submitted our paper to Acl Rolling Review (ARR), NAACL conference.
[Aug]: Participated at TREC iKAT 2024.
[2024-Jul]: Attended the ESSIR summer school.
[2024-May]: Our paper got accepted at LLM4Eval workshop.
[2024-March]: Our paper got accepted at SIGIR conference.
[2024]: Co-organizing the iKAT TREC.
[2023-Nov]: Our team ranked 1st at iKAT TREC 2023.
[2023-Oct]: Our paper got accepted at WSDM conference.
[2023-June]: Our paper got accepted at UMAP conference.
[2023]: Co-organizing the iKAT TREC.
Education
Jan 2023 - Now
Ph.D. Student
IRLab, University of Amsterdam (UVA), Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Thesis: Conversational Search and Recommendation
March 2022 - Dec 2022
University Researcher
Text Mining and Retrieval Leiden (TMRL) group, LIACS (Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science), Leiden, The Netherlands
Project: Patent mining for EPO
Sep 2018 - Feb 2021
M.Sc. of Computer Engineering - Artificial Intelligence
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnics), Tehran, Iran
Thesis: Text-based Question Answering with Deep Attentional Neural Networks
Sep 2014 - Sep 2018
B.Sc. of Computer Engineering - Software Engineering
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnics), Tehran, Iran
Thesis: Big Data Storage and Retrieval in Form of a Data Lake
Sep 2007 - Sep 2014
High School - Mathematics and Physics
National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (Sampad), Farzanegan one, Hamedan, Iran
Publications
Abbasiantaeb, Zahra, Chuan Meng, Leif Azzopardi, and Mohammad Aliannejadi. "Can We Use Large Language Models to Fill Relevance Judgment Holes?" arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.05600 (2024). [pdf]
Abbasiantaeb, Zahra, and Mohammad Aliannejadi. "Generate then Retrieve: Conversational Response Retrieval Using LLMs as Answer and Query Generators." arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.19302 (2024). [pdf]
Aliannejadi, Mohammad, Abbasiantaeb, Zahra, Shubham Chatterjee, Jeffrey Dalton, and Leif Azzopardi. "TREC iKAT 2023: A Test Collection for Evaluating Conversational and Interactive Knowledge Assistants." In Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 819-829, 2024.[pdf]
Abbasiantaeb, Zahra, Yifei Yuan, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Mohammad Aliannejadi. "Let the llms talk: Simulating human-to-human conversational qa via zero-shot llm-to-llm interactions." In Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pp. 8-17. 2024. [pdf]
Abbasiantaeb, Zahra, Suzan Verberne and Jian Wang. "Unveiling hidden links: A machine learning pipeline for extracting and matching patent in-text references to scientific publications" under review of JASIST, 2024.
Abbasiantaeb, Zahra, 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." TREC, 2023.
Murgia, Emiliana, Abbasiantaeb, Zahra, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Theo Huibers, Monica Landoni, and Maria Soledad Pera. "ChatGPT in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration on the Feasibility of Adapting ChatGPT to Support Children’s Information Discovery." In Adjunct Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization, pp. 22-27. 2023. [pdf]
Darvishi, Kasra, Newsha Shahbodaghkhan, Abbasiantaeb, Zahra, and Saeedeh Momtazi. "PQuAD: A Persian question answering dataset''. Computer Speech \& Language 80 (2023): 101486. [pdf]
Abbasiantaeb, Zahra, Suzan Verberne, and Jian Wang. "Optimizing BERT-based reference mining from patents." PatentSemTech 2022 (2022): 4. [pdf]
Abbasiantaeb, Zahra, and Saeedeh Momtazi. "Entity-aware answer sentence selection for question answering with transformer-based language models." Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 59.3 (2022): 755-777. [pdf]
Abbasiantaeb, Zahra and Saeedeh Momtazi. "Text based question answering from information retrieval and deep neural network perspectives: A survey" Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 11.6 (2021): e1412. [pdf]
Books
Academic Services
[2024]: Co-organizing the TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistant Track (iKAT) at TREC.
[2024]: Reviewer of conferences: CLEF24, SIGIR24, CIKM24, LLM4Eval and E-commerce workshops of SIGIR24.
[2024]: Talk on Simulation of Conversation at Qazvin Islamic Azad University (QIAU), Iran.
[2023]: Co-organizing the TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistant Track (iKAT) at TREC.
Teaching Assistance
Sep 2024 - Nov 2024
Information Retrieval 0 (IR0), (B.Sc.)
Instructed by Dr. Mohammad Aliannejadi at University of Amsterdam (UVA)
Sep 2023 - Nov 2023
Information Retrieval 0 (IR0), (B.Sc.)
Instructed by Dr. Mohammad Aliannejadi at University of Amsterdam (UVA)
July 2021 - Sep 2021
An introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Instructed by Dr. Saeedeh Momtazi at Hamrah Academy
Sep 2019 - Feb 2020
Information Retrieval and Web Search, (M.Sc.)
Instructed by Dr. Saeedeh Momtazi at Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT)
Feb 2019 - Jul 2019
Machine Learning, (M.Sc.)
Instructed by Dr. Ehsan Nazerfard at Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT)
Feb 2018 - Jul 2018
Artificial Intelligence, (B.Sc.)
Instructed by Dr. Ahmad Nikabadi at Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT)
Sep 2016 - Feb 2017
System Design and Analysis, (B.Sc.)
Instructed by Mr. Bahman Pourvatan at Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT)
Feb 2016 - Jul 2016
Advanced Computer Programming, (B.Sc.)
Instructed by Mr. Bahman Pourvatan at Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT)
Sep 2015 - Feb 2016
Principals Of Computer And Programming, (B.Sc.)
Instructed by Mr. Bahman Pourvatan at Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT)
Honors and Awards
Nov 2024 - Maryland, USA
Ranked 1st in TREC iKAT 2024 competition.
Aug 2024 - Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Nominated for Apple Scholars PhD fellowship in Al/ML.
Feb 2024 - Merida, Mexico
Received SIGIR student travel grant from ACM.
Nov 2023 - Maryland, USA
Ranked 1st in TREC iKAT 2023 competition.
July 2022 - Madrid, Spain
Received SIGIR Registration Grant from WIR (Woman In the IR)
Jan 2020 - Passau, Germany
Invited to Exchange Program, the University of Passau invited me to study the summer semester of the academic year of 2019/20 as an exchange student.
2020 - Tehran, Iran
Ranked 1 based on GPA among all of the students in Artificial Intelligence, Amirkabir University of Technology.
2017 - Tehran, Iran
Offered direct admission to graduate school, Artificial Intelligence Amirkabir University of Technology.
2014 - Iran
Ranked 212 in the National University Entrance Exam among more than 70,000 students in mathematics and Physics, Iran.
2018 - Tehran, Iran
Ranked 5 based on GPA among all of the students in Software Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology.
Contact Me!
Address:
Lab42
Science Park 900
1098 XH Amsterdam
Email:
zahraabbasiyantaeb[at]gmail[dot]com
z.abbasiantaeb[at]uva[dot]nl