18 citations · 52 across the 15 of their papers we have counts for
15 papers
CIR at iKAT SCAI 2026: Exploring Clarification Need Prediction in Agentic Conversational Search
Nolwenn Bernard, Jüri Keller, Philipp Schaer
This paper presents the participation of the Cologne Information Retrieval group in the iKAT SCAI 2026 shared task. We use an agentic conversational search system, equipped with to…
Validating Search Query Simulations: A Taxonomy of Measures
Andreas Konstantin Kruff, Nolwenn Bernard, Philipp Schaer
Assessing the validity of user simulators when used for the evaluation of information retrieval systems remains an open question, constraining their effective use and the reliabili…
UserSimCRS v2: Simulation-Based Evaluation for Conversational Recommender Systems
Nolwenn Bernard, Krisztian Balog
Resources for simulation-based evaluation of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are scarce. The UserSimCRS toolkit was introduced to address this gap. In this work, we prese…
Limitations of Current Evaluation Practices for Conversational Recommender Systems and the Potential of User Simulation
Nolwenn Bernard, Krisztian Balog
Research and development on conversational recommender systems (CRSs) critically depends on sound and reliable evaluation methodologies. However, the interactive nature of these sy…
SimLab: A Platform for Simulation-based Evaluation of Conversational Information Access Systems
Nolwenn Bernard, Sharath Chandra Etagi Suresh, Krisztian Balog +1
Progress in conversational information access (CIA) systems has been hindered by the difficulty of evaluating such systems with reproducible experiments. While user simulation offe…
CRS Arena: Crowdsourced Benchmarking of Conversational Recommender Systems
Nolwenn Bernard, Hideaki Joko, Faegheh Hasibi +1
We introduce CRS Arena, a research platform for scalable benchmarking of Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) based on human feedback. The platform displays pairwise battles be…
Report on the Workshop on Simulations for Information Access (Sim4IA 2024) at SIGIR 2024
Timo Breuer, Christin Katharina Kreutz, Norbert Fuhr +15
This paper is a report of the Workshop on Simulations for Information Access (Sim4IA) workshop at SIGIR 2024. The workshop had two keynotes, a panel discussion, nine lightning talk…
Towards a Formal Characterization of User Simulation Objectives in Conversational Information Access
Nolwenn Bernard, Krisztian Balog
User simulation is a promising approach for automatically training and evaluating conversational information access agents, enabling the generation of synthetic dialogues and facil…
Identifying Breakdowns in Conversational Recommender Systems using User Simulation
Nolwenn Bernard, Krisztian Balog
We present a methodology to systematically test conversational recommender systems with regards to conversational breakdowns. It involves examining conversations generated between…
IAI MovieBot 2.0: An Enhanced Research Platform with Trainable Neural Components and Transparent User Modeling
Nolwenn Bernard, Ivica Kostric, Krisztian Balog
While interest in conversational recommender systems has been on the rise, operational systems suitable for serving as research platforms for comprehensive studies are currently la…
PKG API: A Tool for Personal Knowledge Graph Management
Nolwenn Bernard, Ivica Kostric, Weronika Łajewska +4
Personal knowledge graphs (PKGs) offer individuals a way to store and consolidate their fragmented personal data in a central place, improving service personalization while maintai…
Leveraging User Simulation to Develop and Evaluate Conversational Information Access Agents
Nolwenn Bernard
We observe a change in the way users access information, that is, the rise of conversational information access (CIA) agents. However, the automatic evaluation of these agents rema…
MG-ShopDial: A Multi-Goal Conversational Dataset for e-Commerce
Nolwenn Bernard, Krisztian Balog
Conversational systems can be particularly effective in supporting complex information seeking scenarios with evolving information needs. Finding the right products on an e-commerc…
An Ecosystem for Personal Knowledge Graphs: A Survey and Research Roadmap
Martin G. Skjæveland, Krisztian Balog, Nolwenn Bernard +2
This paper presents an ecosystem for personal knowledge graphs (PKGs), commonly defined as resources of structured information about entities related to an individual, their attrib…
DAGFiNN: A Conversational Conference Assistant
Ivica Kostric, Krisztian Balog, Tølløv Alexander Aresvik +10
DAGFiNN is a conversational conference assistant that can be made available for a given conference both as a chatbot on the website and as a Furhat robot physically exhibited at th…