Delft, Netherlands

I am a PhD candidate at TU Delft on the topic of conversational search under the supervision of Claudia Hauff. Before joining the PhD, I worked with machine learning and data science projects for 3 years at Hekima.

My research is currently focused on neural rankers for information-seeking conversations. We created a novel dialogue corpus of information-seeking conversations which has a few properties previous datasets lack: MANtIS. We studied how neural rankers for dialogue perform on unseen domains, and how to improve then in the domain adaptation setup. We also showed that by intelligently sorting the training batches we get more effective neural rankers: curriculum learning for IR. In our latest work we reflect on the challenges of current offline evaluation schemes for conversational search tasks.

I am currently developing a library that facilitates experiments with pre-trained transformers, e.g. BERT, for ranking: transformer-rankers. It can be used to quickly train and evaluate a transformer-based model for different ranking tasks, such as passage retrieval, adhoc retrieval, conversation response ranking, etc.