CIIR Talk Series: Suzan Verberne (Leiden University), Is the Search Engine of the Future a Chatbot?

Content

Speaker

Suzan Verberne

Abstract

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has had a huge impact on the interaction of users with information. Many people argue that the age of search engines as we know them has ended, while other people argue that retrieval technology is more relevant than ever before, because we need information to be grounded in sources. In my talk I will argue that both statements are true. I will discuss the multiple relations between LLMs and Information Retrieval: how can they strengthen each other, what are the challenges we face, and what directions should we go in our research? 

Bio

Suzan Verberne is professor of Natural Language Processing at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University. She obtained her PhD in 2010 on the topic of Question Answering at Radboud University in Nijmegen, and she has since then been working on the edge between Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR). She has supervised projects involving a large number of application domains and collaborations: from social media to law and from archeology to health. Her recent work centers around interactive information access for specific domains and low-resource contexts. She has a strong interest in the interplay between search engines and large language models. Suzan is highly active in the NLP and IR communities, holding chairing positions in the large world-wide conferences. 

About

The CIIR Talk Series is an initiative for researchers and practitioners working on information retrieval and related disciplines to present their work.

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