Jie ZOU
Professor, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Contact: zoujie0806@gmail.com
Dr. Jie Zou is a full professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). Before joining UESTC, I was a Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, working with Prof. Cheng Long and Prof. Aixin Sun. From 2017 to 2021, I was a PostDoc and received my doctorate degree in the IRLab group (formerly known as ILPS group) in 2021, under the supervision of Prof. Evangelos Kanoulas (supervisor/promotor) and Prof. Maarten de Rijke (co-supervisor/co-promotor) in the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands. I received the B.Sc. degree and MSc degree (recommended as a MSc Exempt from Admission Exam) in Software Engineering from Chongqing University, Chongqing, China. I was born in Hengyang (the city with Mount Heng), Hunan province, China.
My research interests include Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Recommender Systems, and Multimedia. My current research mainly focuses on conversational search and recommendation, including designing algorithms and understanding the potential mechanism of these technologies by user studies.
A full international PhD scholarship and a few PostDoc programs in AI, NLP, Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems, and Multimedia available now!
Education Background
2017/10- 2021/09 University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, supervised by Prof. Evangelos Kanoulas and Prof. Maarten de Rijke
2014/09- 2017/07 Chongqing University, Chongqing, China
2010/09- 2014/07 Chongqing University, Chongqing, China
Doctorate Degree
Master Degree of Science
Bachelor Degree of Science
Working Experience
2023/06- present Professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.
2021/11- 2023/05 Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University. Advisor: Prof. Cheng Long and Prof. Aixin Sun.
2021/07- 2021/11 Postdoc researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Advisor: Prof. Evangelos Kanoulas
2021/04- 2021/06 Visiting scholar at York University, Toronto, Canada. Advisor: Prof. Jimmy Xiangji Huang
News Update:
[12/2024]: One AAAI paper and one WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal paper are accepted.
[08/2024]: One CIKM paper and one TMM paper are accepted.
[07/2024]: One TOIS paper "Knowledge-Enhanced Conversational Recommendation via Transformer-based Sequential Modelling" and one ECCV paper "Region-aware Distribution Contrast: A Novel Approach to Multi-Task Partially Supervised Learning" are accepted.
[07/2023]: Participate in SIGIR 2023 online and give a presentation on the paper "Learning to Ask: Conversational Product Search via Representation Learning".
[06/2023]: Joined the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC)
[12/2022]: Invited to program committee of SIGIR 2023
[11/2022]: Our paper "Asking Clarifying Questions: to Benefit or to Disturb Users in Web Search?" has been accepted by Information Processing and Management (IPM).
[11/2022]: Best Demo: Second Prize Winner provided by SCALE@NTU networking seminar 2022.
[10/2022]: Participate in Information Processing and Management Conference 2022 and give an presentation on the paper "Asking Clarifying Questions: to Benefit or to Disturb Users in Web Search?".
[07/2022]: Our paper "Learning to Ask: Conversational Product Search via Representation Learning," has been accepted by ACM Transactions on Information Systems.
[07/2022]: Participate in SIGIR 2022 and give a presentation on the paper "Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Transformer-based Sequential Modelling".
[04/2022]: Our paper "Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Transformer-based Sequential Modelling" was accepted by SIGIR 2022.
[03/2022]: Our paper "Users Meet Clarifying Questions: Toward a Better Understanding of User Interactions for Search Clarification" was accepted by ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) .
[09/2021]: Defended my PhD thesis at the University of Amsterdam (UvA).
[07/2021]: Will participate in SIGIR 2021 and give a presentation on the paper "Towards Question-Based High-Recall Information Retrieval: Locating the Last Few Relevant Documents for Technology Assisted Reviews"
[06/2021]: My PhD thesis and flipbook are now available online here (with password: ir9ugu), and also here from UvA.
[06/2021]: Invited talk in Sun Yat-sen University.
[03/2021]: Our paper "Category Aware Explainable Conversational Recommendation" was accepted by MICROS@ECIR 2021.
[12/2020]: Gave a presentation invited by School of Big Data & Software Engineering, Chongqing University.
[07/2020]: Our paper "An Empirical Study on Clarifying Question-Based Systems" was accepted by CIKM 2020. CIKM Slides. pdf: ACM version. pdf: Arxiv Long version. Presentation Video: email to j.zou@uva.nl.
[04/2020]: Our paper "Towards Question-based Recommender Systems" was accepted by SIGIR 2020. Presentation: Video and Slides.
[03/2020]: Our paper "Towards Question-Based High-Recall Information Retrieval: Locating the Last Few Relevant Documents for Technology Assisted Reviews" was accepted by ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).
[11/2019]: I participated in DIR 2019 and gave a presentation, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
[11/2019]: Invited talk in Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, invited by Assoc. Prof. Shangsong Liang.
[10/2019]: I participated in CIKM 2019 and gave a presentation, held in Beijing, China. Slides. Poster.
[09/2019]: Got CIKM 2019 student travel grant
[08/2019]: Our paper "Learning to Ask: Question-based Sequential Bayesian Product Search" was accepted by CIKM 2019.
[07/2019]: I participated in SIGIR 2019 held in Paris, France.
[06/2019]: I attended Google NLP summit and gave a presentation, invited by Google, held in Zurich, Switzerland.
[11/2018]: I attended Tony Kent Strix Award 2018 held in London, UK.
[09/2018]: I was supported by Tang Lixin Travel Scholarship and went for a cruise trip from Hong Kong to Singapore, via Vietnam and Thailand.
[07/2018]: I participated in SIGIR 2018 and gave a presentation, held in Ann Arbor Michigan, U.S.A.
[07/2018]: Got SIGIR 2018 student travel award
[06/2018]: I participated in a summer school ASDM 2018 held in Madrid, Spain.
[04/2018]: Our paper "Technology Assisted Reviews: Finding the Last Few Relevant Documents by Asking Yes/No Questions to Reviewers." was accepted by SIGIR 2018.
Services:
Program Committee: SIGIR 2024 & 2023, TheWebConf 2025 & 2024, ACM MM 2023, ACL 2021, IJCAI 2020, WSDM, CIKM, RecSys, EMNLP, COLING, MICROS@ECIR.
Journal Invited Reviewer: ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), Information Processing & Management (IP&M), Data & Knowledge Engineering(DKE), Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS), Semantic Web Journal(SWJ).
