Xi Wang

University of Sheffield. Natural Language Processing Group.

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135 Regent Court (east), Sheffield

A lecturer (~Assistant Professor) of Natural Language Processing at The University of Sheffield (TUoS) with research interests in Interactive NLP, Conversational AI, and personalisation as well as relevant topics among Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR). Before joining the University of Sheffield, I obtained my PhD from the University of Glasgow, supervised by Prof. Iadh Ounis and Prof. Craig Macdonald and focusing on the research topic of developing review-based recommender systems. After that, I joined the web intelligence group of University College London (UCL) as a postdoctoral researcher, supervised by Prof. Emine Yilmaz and working on Task-oriented Dialogue Systems. My existing works have been published in top-tier international NLP and IR conferences, including ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, SIGIR, CIKM, WWW and ECIR. During the postdoctoral research period, joined with Prof. Emine Yilmaz, a research grant was awarded by Google for developing Knowledge-enriched task-oriented dialogue systems.

I am actively looking for PhD students to work on topics related to proactive conversational information seeking, retrieval augmented generation and user simulation. If you are interested, please drop an email to xi.wang[at]sheffield.ac.uk with the subject starts with [PhD 2026].

news

Dec 1, 2023 Paper “A Social-aware Gaussian Pre-trained Model for Effective Cold-start Recommendation” accepted to the journal of Information Processing & Management (IP&M).
Oct 7, 2023 Paper “Improving Conversational Recommendation Systems via Bias Analysis and Language-Model-Enhanced Data Augmentation” accepted to EMNLP 2023 (Findings).
Jan 7, 2023 Co-first authored paper “A Survey on Asking Clarification Questions Datasets in Conversational Systems” accepted to ACL 2023 (main).
Nov 1, 2022 Received Google research workshop grant on Action, Task and User Journey ($20,000) as Co-recipient with Prof. Emine Yilmaz.
Oct 1, 2022 Co-first authored paper “Task2KB: A Public Task-Oriented Knowledge Base” accepted to AAAI 2023.

selected publications

  1. ECIR
    Simulated Task Oriented Dialogues for Developing Versatile Conversational Agents
    Xi Wang, Procheta Sen, Ruizhe Li, and 1 more author
    In European Conference on Information Retrieval, 2024
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  2. EACL
    Clarifying the Path to User Satisfaction: An Investigation into Clarification Usefulness
    Hossein A Rahmani, Xi Wang, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and 2 more authors
    In European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings), 2024
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  3. EMNLP
    Improving Conversational Recommendation Systems via Bias Analysis and Language-Model-Enhanced Data Augmentation
    Xi Wang, Hossein A Rahmani, Jiqun Liu, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of International Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Findings), 2023
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  4. ACL
    A Survey on Asking Clarification Questions Datasets in Conversational Systems
    Hossein A Rahmani*, Xi Wang*, Yue Feng, and 3 more authors
    In Proceedings of Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (main), 2023
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  5. WebConf
    Leveraging review properties for effective recommendation
    Xi Wang, Iadh Ounis, and Craig Macdonald
    In Proceedings of the Web Conference, 2021
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  6. CIKM
    Negative confidence-aware weakly supervised binary classification for effective review helpfulness classification
    Xi Wang, Iadh Ounis, and Craig Macdonald
    In Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management, 2020
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