About Me
I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Officer in IELab within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Queensland, Australia. During my Ph.D, I worked closely with Prof. Guido Zuccon, A/Prof. Bevan Koopman, and Dr. Ahmed Mourad (Read My Thesis). Prior to Ph.D, I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities in United States, 2016.
My research focuses on the intersection of Information Retrieval (IR), Large Language Models (LLMs), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning (ML), where I utilise different relevance feedback signals to empower information retrieval systems. My recent work seeks to address the gap between relevance feedback, deep language models, and information retrieval through approaches that improve IR system effectiveness with minimal efficiency cost.
I publish at premier academic venues in IR (e.g. SIGIR, ECIR, WSDM, WWW, TOIS, IJDL). During my Ph.D, my work was supported by Grains Research and Development Corporation, through the AgAsk Project.
News
2026-02-25
📃 My thesis “Advanced Query Representation and Feedback Methods for Neural Information Retrieval” is now public at UQ eSpace, read it here.2026-01-15
🎉 I’ve successfully defended my thesis! Huge thanks to my external examiners Prof. Iadh Ounis and Prof. Jamie Callan, as well as my Chair Dr. Joel Mackenzie. Also huge thanks to my supervisors Prof. Guido, A/Prof. Bevan, Dr. Ahmed, and everyone along my journey! Now a new chapter has started!2025-12-17
🎉 Our work Evaluator - Rapid, Agile Development and Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation Systems Without Labels has been accetped to ECIR 2026!2025-10-01
🎉 Officially started to work as a Postdoctoral Research Officer at UQ! Check out my profile here.2025-07-30
🎉 Finally submitted my PhD Thesis! Pending review and starting to work as a PostDoc in IELab at The University of Queensland.2025-02-18
🎉 We have one work released on arXiv, check it out here: Pseudo-Relevance Feedback Can Improve Zero-Shot LLM-Based Dense Retrieval!2024-11-03
🎉 We have one work released on arXiv, check it out here: LLM-VPRF: Large Language Model Based Vector Pseudo Relevance Feedback!2024-10-07
✈️ Back at Brisbane with full research power ON.2024-01-24
🎉 Our work TPRF: A Transformer-based Pseudo-Relevance Feedback Model for Efficient and Effective Retrieval is now on arXiv preprint!
MORE...
- 2023-06-19
🎉 Our work AgAsk: An Agent to Help Answer Farmer’s Questions From Scientific Documents has been accepted to International Journal on Digital Libraries! - 2022-11-23
🎉 Our paper MeSH Suggester: A Library and System for MeSH Term Suggestion for Systematic Review Boolean Query Construction has been accepted to WSDM 2023! - 2022-11-23
🎉 Our paper AgAsk: A Conversational Search Agent for Answering Agricultural Questions has been accepted to WSDM 2023! - 2022-11-15
🎉 Our paper Pseudo-Relevance Feedback with Dense Retrievers in Pyserini has been accepted to ADCS 2022! - 2022-11-14
✈️ Visiting China, working remotely. - 2022-07-26
🏫 Came back from SIGIR 2022, now working on campus. - 2022-07-01
✈️ I will be in Italy and Spain during 2022/07/06 - 2022/07/25 for SIGIR 2022. - 2022-04-01
🎉 Our paper To interpolate or not to Interpolate: PRF, Dense and Sparse Retrievers has been accepted to SIGIR 2022! - 2022-04-01
🎉 Our paper Implicit Feedback for Dense Passage Retrieval: A Counterfactual Approach has been accepted to SIGIR 2022! - 2022-04-01
🎉 Our paper How does Feedback Signal Quality Impact Effectiveness of Pseudo Relevance Feedback for Passage Retrieval has been accepted to SIGIR 2022! - 2022-01-18
🎉 Our paper MeSH Term Suggestion for Systematic Review Literature Search has been awarded the Best Student Paper Award in ADCS 2021! - 2022-01-01
🎉 Our dataset Agvaluate is now available on UQ eSpace! - 2021-11-26
📃 Our paper Improving Query Representations for Dense Retrieval with Pseudo Relevance Feedback: A Reproducibility Study has been accepted to ECIR 2022! The code is open-sourced here. - 2021-11-15
📃 Our paper MeSH Term Suggestion for Systematic Review Literature Search has been accepted to ADCS 2021! The code is open-sourced here. - 2020-11-13
📃 Our workshop paper IELAB at TREC Deep Learning Track 2021 is now published! - 2021-09-25
🎉 Our team ielab (Shengyao Zhuang, Shuai Wang, and myself) successfully defended our method and won the championship in the "Search Rankings in Multimodal and Multilingual Contexts Track" within the 2021 Huawei DIGIX Global AI Challenge! Go TEAM IELAB! - 2021-09-09
🎉 I've successfully passed the PhD Confirmation! Yay! Looking foward to do more experiments! - 2021-08-25
📃 Our journal paper Pseudo Relevance Feedback with Deep Language Models and Dense Retrievers: Successes and Pitfalls is now available on arXiv! Code is available at here. Paper is currently under review, was submitted to the Journal of ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) in June, 2021. - 2020-12-15
📃 Our paper Deep Query Likelihood Model for Information Retrieval has been accepted to ECIR 2021 as a short paper! The code is open-sourced here. A video of the work is available here. - 2020-12-06
📃 Our paper Design and Research of Intelligent Question-Answering(Q&A) System Based on High School Course Knowledge Graph has been accepted to Mobile Networks and Applications as a journal paper! - 2020-11-11
📃 Our workshop paper IELAB for TREC Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT) 2020 is now published online! Our submissions are open-sourced here. - 2020-07-26
💬 I will present our work on Systematic Review Automation Tools for End-to-End Query Formulation at the SIGIR 2020! - 2020-04-22
📃 Our paper Systematic Review Automation Tools for End-to-End Query Formulation has been accepted to SIGIR 2020 as a Demo paper! The code is open-sourced here. A video of my talk is also available online. - 2020-03-01
🏫 I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining IELab @ UQ as a Ph.D student in Information Retrieval under the supervision of A/Prof. Guido Zuccon starting next month!
Travel
2024-12-09 – 2024-12-12
✈️ Melbourne for SIGIR AP 2024 Satellite2023-02-27 – 2023-03-03
✈️ Singapore for WSDM 2023
MORE...
- 2022-11-14 -- 2024-10-06
✈️ Back to China for visting family - 2022-07-11 -- 2022-07-15
✈️ Madrid, Spain for SIGIR 2022 - 2022-04-10 -- 2022-04-14
✈️Stavanger, Norway for ECIR 2022(Attending Online) - 2021-11-01 -- 2021-11-05
✈️Gold Coast, Australia for CIKM 2021(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2021-07-11 -- 2021-07-15
✈️Montréal, Québec, Canada for SIGIR/ICTIR 2021(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2021-04-19 -- 2021-04-23
✈️Ljubljana, Slovenia for WWW 2021(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2021-03-28 -- 2021-04-01
✈️Lucca, Italy for ECIR 2021(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2021-03-14 -- 2021-03-19
✈️Canberra, Australia for CHIIR 2021(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2021-03-08 -- 2021-03-12
✈️Jerusalem, Israel for WSDM 2021(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2020-10-19 -- 2020-10-23
✈️Galway, Ireland for CIKM 2020(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2020-09-14 -- 2020-09-17
✈️Stavanger, Norway for ICTIR 2020(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2020-08-13 -- 2020-08-14
✈️Vancouver, Canada for CHIIR 2020(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2020-07-25 -- 2020-07-30
✈️Xi'An, China for SIGIR 2020(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2020-07-05 -- 2020-07-10
✈️Seattle, WA, USA for NAACL 2020(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2020-04-20 -- 2020-04-24
✈️Taipei, Taiwan for WWW 2020(Cancelled due to COVID-19) - 2020-04-14 -- 2020-04-17
✈️Lisbon, Portugal for ECIR 2020(Cancelled due to COVID-19)
Recent Publications
Datasets:
Service
Serving as the PC Member for Short Paper Track at ECIR 2026.
Serving as the PC Member for Short Paper Track at WSDM 2026.
Serving as the PC Member for Short Paper Track at SIGIR 2025/2026.
Serving as Reviewer for ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) since 2024.
Serving as the PC Member for Resource and Reproducibility Track at ECIR 2023/2024.
Serving as the PC Member for Reproducibility Track at SIGIR 2022/2023.
Serving as the PC Member for Resource Track at SIGIR 2022/2023.
Serving as the Proceeding Chair for CIKM 2021.