Jie ZOU
Professor, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Professor, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Contact: zoujie0806@gmail.com
Dr. Jie Zou is a 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 Postdoctoral Researcher and received my Doctoral 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) at 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.
A few full international PhD scholarship and PostDoc programs in AI, NLP, Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems, and Multimedia available now! Contact with me if you are interested.
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:
[05/2025]: One ICCV paper and one journal paper (IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology) in my team have been accepted.
[04/2025]: Three SIGIR papers about conversational systems in my team have been accepted.
[03/2025]: We got the first position in the recommendation track of the AgentSociety Challenge in TheWebConf (WWW) 2025.
[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 2025 & 2024 & 2023, TheWebConf 2025 & 2024, ACL 2025 & 2021, ACM MM 2023, 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).