CIIR researchers receive ACM SIGIR 2023 Best Student Paper Award and ACM ICTIR 2023 Best Paper Honorable Mention

At the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023), co-authors Alireza Salemi (CIIR doctoral student), Juan Altmayer Pizzorno (UMass Amherst CICS doctoral student), and Hamed Zamani (CIIR Associate Director and CICS Assistant Professor) received the Best Student Award for their paper, "A Symmetric Dual Encoding Dense Retrieval Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering." SIGIR is the premier international forum for the presentation of new research results and for the demonstration of new systems and techniques in information retrieval. The 2023 conference is held in Taipei Taiwan from July 23-27, 2023. Photo: ACM SIGIR Chair Vanessa Murdock and Hamed Zamani (right).

At the 9th ACM SIGIR (13th overall) International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2023) held jointly with the ACM SIGIR 2023 conference, CIIR researchers received the ICTIR 2023 Best Paper Award Honorable Mention. CIIR co-authors Zhiqi Huang, Shahrzad Naseri, Hamed Bonab, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar and James Allan were recognized for their paper, "Hierarchical Transformer-based Query by Multiple Documents."

Also at SIGIR 2023, former CIIR doctoral students Weize Kong (Ph.D. '16) and Michael Bendersky (Ph.D. '12) along with their co-authors Jeffrey M. Dudek, Cheng Li, and Mingyang Zhang received the Best Short Paper Award for their paper "SparseEmbed: Learning Sparse Lexical Representations with Contextual Embeddings for Retrieval."