Zhenduo Wang

Life update: I defended my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Utah. I am excited to work as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology with @alan_ritter.

@ChuanMg @maliannejadi @SIGIRConf I wish I could attend it in person :(

@Zhenduo_W @maliannejadi @SIGIRConf Thanks. See you in Italy!

Happy to share that our tutorial “Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the LLM Era”, with Fengran Mo, @maliannejadi and Jian-Yun Nie, got accepted at @SIGIRConf #SIGIR2025! Look forward to engaging discussions on LLM-based and agentic conversational search.

A new survey of conversational search just came out! arxiv.org/abs/2410.15576

@QingyaoAi Congratulations Qingyao!

It’s my great honor to receive the ACM SIGIR ECR award! While I'm unable to attend the ceremony in person due to visa issues, I really appreciate the recognition and support from the award committee and #SIGIR, and will continue to do my best for IR research and community！ 🎉 🎉

@TechAtBloomberg @UUtah @UtahNLP @ashimgupta95 @Bloomberg Grats, Ashim!

Congratulations to @UUtah + @UtahNLP’s @ashimgupta95 on being one of the 2023-2024 @Bloomberg #DataScience Ph.D. Fellows! Learn more about Ashim’s research focus and our latest cohort of Fellows: bloom.bg/452q8Au #AI #ML #NLProc

Thrilled to share that I was honored as a distinguished speaker at the Web Conference 2024! Thank the organizers for the opportunity to let my words inspire! Check out our work on user simulation for conversational search: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/35… code: github.com/zhenduow/UserS…

@EllenRiloff Today, those who stand on sentences with # of puns=1 shall fall. We could automatically disqualify them because they make us sick.

I love this sign so much, both as an animal lover and a NLP geek -- it's both literally true and sarcastic.😁

@puding_p Thank you! Can't wait to see your paper!

@Zhenduo_W Thank you for tuning in! I'm glad to hear that our findings align. I've seen your preprint and I'm looking forward to reading it in-depth :)

Starting in ~1 hour, sign up below to get the Zoom link :) See ya soon!

@puding_p We've reached many similar conclusions as yours in the talk. Finetuned models are usually better in every aspect. LLMs hallucinate user responses that would not be answered by real humans. That just invalidates the purpose of user simulators.

@puding_p Very nice talk!

1. Why existing methods struggle to simulate users during search. 2. How the task resembles question answering but is distinctive. 3. Why LLMs are still inadequate for reliable user simulation. Our paper is now available: arxiv.org/abs/2304.07944 Code: github.com/zhenduow/UserS… 3/3

In our recent work "An In-depth Investigation of User Response Simulation for Conversational Search" accepted by #TheWebConf2024 @QingyaoAi @zhichaoxu_ir, we investigate the challenges of user simulation for conversational search and present timely analyses of: 2/3

Conversational search systems are mostly limited to being trained and evaluated with artificial and recorded search logs, which fails to address the open-ended nature of conversations in reality. A key reason for this is the lack of reliable user simulation. 1/3

@EllenRiloff @alan_ritter Thank you, Ellen! It was truly a pleasure to have known and worked with you!

@Zhenduo_W @alan_ritter Congratulations, Zhenduo!!! Or I guess I should call you Dr. Wang now. 😀 And a second congratulations on that awesome post-doc position!! Super happy for you.

Life update: I defended my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Utah. I am excited to work as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology with @alan_ritter.

@QingyaoAi Thank you very much, Qingyao. I feel honored and grateful to have done my PhD with you!

Huge congratulations to my student @Zhenduo_W on acing his thesis defense! Now officially Dr. Wang!👨‍🎓Zhenduo has done many excellent work on conversational search, and will continue his research career as a postdoc. Wishing you continued success in all your future!🎉📚

@keviv9 @QingyaoAi Thanks, Dr. Gupta!

@QingyaoAi @Zhenduo_W Congrats Dr. @Zhenduo_W

Distinguished reviewers! Grats to everyone!