Information Extraction, Retrieval and Presentation

A list of potential topics for PhD students in the area of Information Extraction, Retrieval and Presentation.

Knowledge Enhanced Language Models for Information Retrieval

Supervisors: Jeff Pan and Mirella Lapata

Pre-trained language models have been shown useful for improving the performance of information retrieval, in particular on query understanding. However, such models still suffer from lacking of knowledge and inference capabilities. This present project seeks to investigate how to enrich pre-trained language models with structured knowledge for information retrieval. Projects in this area could involve extending, combining or transforming language models with e.g. some common sense or domain specific schema and / or theory for tasks related to information retrieval, such as document ranking, and compositional reasoning for complex queries.

Knowledge Aware Open Domain Conversational Search

Supervisors: Jeff Pan and Mirella Lapata

In search, there have been a recent trend that people begin to use more conversational search queries, which allows them to ask more specific and context-based questions about the products and services that they are interested in. The present project will address issues around knowledge aware open domain conversational search, such as conversational semantic parsing, multi-hop reasoning and assumption reasoning, as well as constrained decoding for response generation.