Lili Lu

Lili Lu

PhD candidate at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)

Lili Lu

I am a second-year PhD candidate in Information Retrieval Group at the Faculty of Informatics of Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). My doctoral studies are supervised by Prof. Dr. Fabio Crestani. After completing my Master’s degree, I spent a year working as an NLP engineer, at Qatent, France, where I mainly focused on generative tasks in the domain of patent.

Interested in information retrieval (IR), with a particular focus on

  • personalized conversational search,
  • synthetic data generation,
  • large language models (LLMs).

My Profile: [LinkedIn] [Twitter]

Publications

  1. Lili Lu, Chuan Meng, Federico Ravenda, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Fabio Crestani. Zero-Shot and Efficient Clarification Need Prediction in Conversational Search. ECIR’25: The 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval [To appear]
  2. Ivan Sekulić, Lili Lu, Navdeep Singh Bedi, Fabio Crestani. Simulating Conversational Search Users with Parameterized Behavior. SIGIR-AP’24: Proceedings of the 2024 Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region [link]
  3. Isin Su Ecevit, Lili Lu, Fabio Crestani. Responses to Conversational Information Retrieval Clarifying Questions with User Emotions. EMTCIR/UM-CIR@SIGIR-AP’24: Joint Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Evaluation Methodologies,Testbeds and Community for Information Access Research (EMTCIR 2024) and the 1st Workshop on User Modelling in Conversational Information Retrieval (UM-CIR 2024) co-located with the 2nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific (SIGIR-AP 2024), Tokyo, Japan, December 12, 2024 [link]

Teaching & Supervision

  • Co-supervision with Prof. Dr. Fabio Crestani: Isin Su Ecevit; Mater’s thesis

  • Teaching assistant:

    • Data Analytics, 2023-2024, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI); practical session and grading
    • Information Retrieval, 2024-2025, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI); practical session and grading

Education

  • November 2023 - Present
    • Ph.D. in Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Switzerland
    • Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Fabio Crestani
  • August 2020 – September 2022
    • Master in Data Science, KTH, Sweden (EIT Digital Program Year 1)
    • Master in Artifical Intelligence, Université Paris-Saclay, France (EIT Digital Program Year 2)
  • September 2012 – June 2016
    • Bachelor in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Donghua University, China

Contact

  • Email: lili.lu@usi.ch