I am a Ph.D. student at The Information Access and Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the University of Stavanger, supervised by Krisztian Balog. My research interests lie in the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing and machine learning. I'm particularly interested in explainable and transparent conversational search.
I have a master's degree in Artificial Intelligence and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Warsaw University of Technology. I had the opportunity to participate in two student exchanges at the University of Burgos in Spain and Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. My foray into the industry began during the first year of my bachelor's degree, where I worked at Intel Corporation. Afterward, I spent almost two years working as a software developer at Sollers Consulting. Although I enjoyed working closely with clients, I realized that I wasn't quite ready to leave academia behind. And so, my adventure with Information Retrieval in the far north began.
April 22, 2024: I've gave a talk at IR Seminar ogranized by Terrier Group at the University of Glasgow. Thank you for the invitation, it was a pleasure to share and discuss some ideas together [slides].
March 27, 2024: The paper Towards Reliable and Factual Response Generation: Detecting Unanswerable Questions in Information-seeking Conversations by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog has won the Best Short Paper Award at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR ’24).
March 25, 2024: The paper Explainability for Transparent Conversational Information-Seeking by Weronika Łajewska, Damiano Spina, Johanne Trippas, and Krisztian Balog has been accepted at the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '24).
January 29, 2024: The paper An Ecosystem for Personal Knowledge Graphs: A Survey and Research Roadmap by Martin G. Skjæveland, Krisztian Balog, Nolwenn Bernard, Weronika Łajewska, and Trond Linjordet has been accepted by AI Open journal.
January 16, 2024: The paper Exploring the Role of Generative AI in Constructing Knowledge Graphs for Drug Indications with Medical Context by Reham Alharbi, Umair Ahmed, Daniil Dobriy, Weronika Łajewska, Laura Menotti, Mohammad Javad Saeedizade, and Michel Dumontier has been accepted at the 15th International SWAT4HCLS 2024 Conference, Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Healthcare and Life Sciences (SWAT4HCLS'24). This paper is an extension of the project we were working on during International Semantic Web Research Summer School.
December 19, 2023: I've just completed my 3-month research visit to the Research Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics (CIDDA) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. I was collaborating with Damiano Spina and Johanne Trippas on aspects of my research related to the user-system interaction. It has been a truly transformative experience. A special thanks to Damiano Spina, for being an amazing host and helping me make the most of my time there. Learned a ton, met fantastic people — couldn't have asked for a better experience!
December 14, 2023: The paper Towards Reliable and Factual Response Generation: Detecting Unanswerable Questions in Information-seeking Conversations by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog has been accepted at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR'24).
December 14, 2023: The paper Estimating the Usefulness of Clarifying Questions and Answers for Conversational Search by Ivan Sekulic, Weronika Łajewska, Krisztian Balog and Fabio Crestani has been accepted at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR'24).
November 21, 2023: The paper Grounded and Transparent Response Generation for Conversational Information-Seeking Systems by Weronika Łajewska has been accepted to the Doctoral Consortium at the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'24).
October 25, 2023: The paper Towards Filling the Gap in Conversational Search: From Passage Retrieval to Conversational Response Generation by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog has won the Best Resource Paper Award at the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '23).
August 6, 2023: The paper Towards Filling the Gap in Conversational Search: From Passage Retrieval to Conversational Response Generation by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog has been accepted at the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '23). An extended version of the paper is available here.
June 11-17, 2023: I attended International Semantic Web Research Summer School that took place in beautiful Bertinoro in Italy. Thank you to the organizers for this life-changing event!
December 20, 2022: The paper From Baseline to Top Performer: A Reproducibility Study of Approaches at the 2021 TREC Conversational Assistance Track by Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog has been accepted at the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’23). A preprint is available here.
November 15, 2022: IAI research group participated in TREC 2022 Conversational Assistance Track. The working notes from our submission can be found here. The final report is available here.
July 18-22, 2022: I attended The 13th European Summer School in Information Retrieval held at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Great experience and great people!
Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog. 2023. Towards Reliable and Factual Response Generation: Detecting Unanswerable Questions in Information-seeking Conversations. In 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR ’24). March 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56063-7_25
Scholarship award covering the cost of registration and some travel expenses for attending the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.
Weronika Łajewska and Krisztian Balog. 2023. Towards Filling the Gap in Conversational Search: From Passage Retrieval to Conversational Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM I nternational Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 5326–5330. https://doi.org/10.1145/3583780.3615132
Title: Automatic Population of Personal Knowledge Graphs from Social Media and Streaming Platforms
Students: Eirik Paulsrud Wilhelmsen and Ottar Jensen
Teaching assistant for DAT640-2022
W. Łajewska, D. Spina, J. Trippas, and K. Balog. In: 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’24), July 2024.
N. Bernard, I. Kostric, W. Łajewska, K. Balog, P. Galuščáková, V. Setty, and M. G. Skjæveland. In: Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024 (WWW ’24 Companion), May 2024. [preprint, code]
W. Łajewska and K. Balog. In: 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR ’24), March 2024 [paper, code, poster]
I. Sekulic, W. Łajewska, K. Balog and F. Crestani. In: 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR ’24), March 2024 [paper, poster]
W. Łajewska. In: 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'24), March 2024 [paper]
W. Łajewska and K. Balog. In: 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'23), October 2023 [paper, extended version, code]
M. G. Skjæveland, K. Balog, N. Bernard, W. Łajewska, and T. Linjordet. [preprint, poster, paper]
W. Łajewska and K. Balog. In: 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR ’23), April 2023 [paper, code]
W. Łajewska, N. Bernard, I. Kostric, I. Sekulić, and K. Balog. In: The Thirty-First Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2022) Proceedings, 2023 [paper]
I. Kostric, K. Balog, T. A. Aresvik, N. Bernard, E. T. Dørheim, P. Hantula, S. Havn-Sørensen, R. Henriksen, H. Hosseini, E. Khlybova, W. Łajewska, S. E. Mosand, and N. Orujova. In: 16th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ’22), September 2022 [paper, code]
Master thesis supervised by A. Wróblewska
Terrier Group IR Seminar talk presenting the CIKM'23 paper by W. Łajewska and K. Balog entitled Towards Filling the Gap in Conversational Search: From Passage Retrieval to Conversational Response Generation, ECIR'24 paper by W. Łajewska and K. Balog entitled Towards Reliable and Factual Response Generation: Detecting Unanswerable Questions in Information-seeking Conversations, and SIGIR'24 paper by W. Łajewska, D. Spina, J. Trippas, and K. Balog entitled Explainability for Transparent Conversational Information-Seeking, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK, April 2024 [slides]
Presentation of the PhD proposal during Doctoral Consortium at The 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'24), March 2024 [slides]
Presentation of the PhD status during UiS Tech Talk, February 2024 [slides]
Presentation of the paper by W. Łajewska and K. Balog at the local part of SIGIR-AP'23 Melbourne Hub event, November 2023 [paper, extended version, slides, code]
TIGER talk presenting the CIKM'23 paper by W. Łajewska and K. Balog entitled Towards Filling the Gap in Conversational Search: From Passage Retrieval to Conversational Response Generation, as well as the work done in collaboration with Damiano Spina and Johanne Trippas during the mobility in CIDDA, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, November 2023 [slides]