Hamed Zamani
University of Massachusetts Amherst

I am an Assistant Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Associate Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). My research focuses on designing and evaluating statistical and machine learning models with applications to (interactive) information access systems, including search engines, recommender systems, and question answering. I am currently focusing on Neural Information Retrieval and Conversational Search.
Prior to UMass, I was a Researcher at Microsoft, working on a wide range of problems related to search engines. I received my Ph.D. in 2019 from UMass under the direction of W. Bruce Croft. I am the recipient of the CICS Outstanding Dissertation Award for my Ph.D. thesis on weakly supervised neural information retrieval. I obtained my M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from the University of Tehran.
I am an active member of the information retrieval (IR) community and regularly publish at the major IR venues, such as SIGIR, WSDM, WWW, CIKM, ICTIR, and ECIR. A brief description of my past and current research is presented below.
NEW: We have announced the CIIR Talk Series. It is a virtual event and open to everyone! To get the notification of future talks, subscribe to our mailing list as described here.
Prospective Ph.D. Students: I will be hiring multiple Ph.D. students to join the CIIR in Fall 2021. If you are interested in working with me, please apply to our graduate program and list me as a potential advisor. Feel free to send me an email once you submit your application.
Research
My research interests include various aspects of information retrieval, recommender systems, and text mining. My major contributions and current research focus include:
Neural Information Retrieval: Following our initial study on distributed representations for information retrieval (ICTIR16a, ICTIR16b, CIKM16), we have developed multiple neural network models for the fundamental IR tasks. They include relevance-based word embedding (SIGIR17a), context-aware query representation (WWW17), and semi-structured document representation (WSDM18). We have also invented the first learning to rank model that can retrieve (as opposed to re-rank) documents from large-scale collections, called standalone neural ranking model (CIKM18a).
Weak Supervision for IR: We have developed a student-teacher learning model for training machine learning IR models with no labeled data, called weak supervision. We have empirically shown the effectiveness of weak supervision in various IR tasks, including ad-hoc retrieval (SIGIR17b), representation learning (SIGIR17a), and query performance prediction (SIGIR18a). We have also theoretically study weak supervision for information retrieval (ICTIR18). Check out our SIGIR 2018 workshop on learning from limited or noisy data (LND4IR).
Conversational Information Seeking: I have recently focused on conversational search and recommendation with a focus on mixed-initiative interactions, such as asking clarifying questions. We have designed and implemented an extensible platform for conversational information seeking research, called Macaw (see the GitHub repository). We have developed models for generating and selecting clarifying questions (WWW20, SIGIR20a), models for utilizing user response to clarifying questions (SIGIR20b), and offline evaluation methodologies for asking clarifying questions in conversational systems (SIGIR19a). Related to conversational search, we have implemented a unified search framework for mobile devices (SIGIR18b, CIKM18b).
IR Meets RecSys: I have made efforts on bridging the gap between the IR and RecSys communities. We have modeled query expansion as collaborative filtering (CIKM16), proposed content-based recommendation models using IR techniques (RecSys17, IRJ18), and designed a joint search and recommendation model (DESIRES18, WSDM20). I co-organized the ACM Recommender Systems Challenge in 2018 on music playlist generation and continuation, which can be seen as a RecSys or IR task (RecSys18). Check out our visions on music recommendation (IJMIR18) and the overview of ACM RecSys Challenge 2018 (TIST19).
Teaching
Invited Talks
- (Invited Talk) LTI Colloquium, Carnegie Mellon University, Virtual Event, Oct. 2, 2020 Link
- (Invited Talk) Amazon Alexa, Virtual Event, Apr. 24, 2020
- (Invited Talk) University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, Mar. 9, 2020 Link
- (Invited Talk) Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Feb. 25, 2020
- (Invited Talk) University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Feb. 24, 2020 Link
- (Keynote Speaker & Panelist) ConvERSe Workshop at WSDM, Houston, TX, Feb. 7, 2020 Link
- (Invited Talk) Dagstuhl Conversational Search Seminar, Wadern, Germany, Nov. 14, 2019
- (Invited Talk) Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), Seattle, WA, Jun. 20, 2019
- (Invited Talk) Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, Jun. 6, 2019
- (Invited Talk) University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, Apr. 9, 2019
- (Invited Talk) Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, Mar. 27-28, 2019
- (Invited Talk) University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, Mar. 19, 2019
- (Invited Talk) University of Texas, Austin, TX, Mar. 12, 2019
- (Invited Talk) University of North Texas, Denton, TX, Mar. 8, 2019
- (Invited Talk) Yale University, New Haven, CT, Feb. 28, 2019 Link
- (Invited Talk) University of Maryland, College Park, MD, Feb. 20-21, 2019 Link
- (Invited Talk) University of Pittsburgh, PA, Feb. 4-5, 2019 Link
- (Invited Talk) UMass Data Science Talk, Amherst, MA, Oct. 24, 2018 Link
- (Invited Talk) Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, Sep. 18, 2018
- (Invited Talk) Google Research, Mountain View, CA, Mar. 21, 2018
- (Invited Talk) Amazon’s A9, Palo Alto, CA, Mar. 19, 2018 (with Bruce Croft and Qingyao Ai)
- (Invited Talk) Yale University, New Haven, CT, Mar. 2, 2018 Link
Selected Recent Publications
- H. Zamani, B. Mitra, E. Chen, G. Lueck, F. Diaz, P. Bennett, N. Craswell, S. Dumais. “Analyzing and Learning from User Interactions for Search Clarification”, SIGIR 2020.
- H. Hashemi, H. Zamani, W. B. Croft. “Guided Transformer: Leveraging Multiple External Sources for Representation Learning in Conversational Search”, SIGIR 2020.
- H. Zamani, S. Dumais, N. Craswell, P. Bennett, G. Lueck. “Generating Clarifying Questions for Information Retrieval”, WWW 2020.
- H. Zamani, W. B. Croft. “Learning a Joint Search and Recommendation Model from User-Item Interactions”, WSDM 2020.
- M. Aliannejadi, H. Zamani, F. Crestani, W. B. Croft. “Asking Clarifying Questions in Open-Domain Information Seeking Conversations”, SIGIR 2019.
- H. Zamani, M. Dehghani, W. B. Croft, E. Learned-Miller, J. Kamps “From Neural Re-Ranking to Neural Ranking: Learning a Sparse Representation for Inverted Indexing”, CIKM 2018.
- H. Zamani, W. B. Croft. “On the Theory of Weak Supervision for Information Retrieval”, ICTIR 2018.
- H. Zamani, W. B. Croft. “Relevance-based Word Embedding”, SIGIR 2017.
- M. Dehghani, H. Zamani, A. Severyn, J. Kamps, W. B. Croft. “Neural Ranking Models with Weak Supervision”, SIGIR 2017.
- More on the publications page.
Academic Services
- Organizer / Chair:
- SIGIR 2018 Workshop: Learning from Limited or Noisy Data for Information Retrieval
- RecSys 2018 Workshop: ACM RecSys Challenge 2018
- Guest Editor:
- ACM Transactions on Information Systems: Special Issue on Conversational Search and Recommendation
- Senior Program Committee / Area Chair:
- SIGIR 2020 – 2021
- The Web Conference (WWW) 2021
- NAACL 2021
- Program Committee:
- SIGIR 2018 – 2019
- The Web Conference (WWW) 2018 – 2020
- WSDM 2018 – 2020
- RecSys 2018 – 2021
- CIKM 2017 – 2020
- ICTIR 2019 – 2020
- ICLR 2021
- NAACL 2019
- ECIR 2019 (short papers)
- DESIRES 2020
- Workshops: MICROS @ ECIR 2021 – NLI @ ACL 2020 – PodRecs @ RecSys 2020 – SCAI @ IJCAI 2019 – EARS @ SIGIR 2018 – KG4IR @ SIGIR 2017, 2018 – NeuIR @ SIGIR 2017 – LEARNER @ ICTIR 2017 – RecSysChallenge @ RecSys 2017
- Journal Reviewer:
- TOIS
- IRJ
- IP&M
- TKDE
- TWEB
- TIIS
- JASIST
- Inf. Syst.
- ACM SIGIR Student Liaison (representing North and South Americas) 2017 – 2019
news
Oct 24, 2020 | Our MIMICS paper has received the Best Paper Award from CIKM 2020 - The Resource Paper Track. |
Sep 1, 2020 | Joining CIIR at UMass as an Assistant Professor. |
Apr 25, 2020 | 6 papers (3 full, 2 short, and 1 demo) accepted at SIGIR 2020! See publication page. |
Feb 9, 2020 | I gave a keynote on “Towards Mixed-Initiative Conversational Information Seeking” at the ConvERSe workshop @ WSDM 2020. |
Dec 19, 2019 | We have designed and implemented an open-source platform for conversational information seeking research, called Macaw. Macaw is open-sourced under the MIT License [paper] [GitHub Repo]. |
Nov 14, 2019 | I gave a talk on “Clarification in Conversational Search” at the Dagstuhl Conversational Search Seminar. I will be releasing an open-source framework for conversational information seeking research soon. Stay tuned! |
Oct 18, 2019 | Our ICTIR 2019 paper won the best short paper honorable mention award. In the same week, our paper on entity-centric retrieval for multi-hop QA won the best paper award at EMNPL-MRQA 2019. |
Aug 27, 2019 | I have defended my Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Neural Models for Information Retrieval without Labeled Data”. |
Aug 4, 2019 | I will be joining Microsoft AI Research as a Researcher in September! |
Apr 22, 2019 | Joining Microsoft AI Research as an intern to work with Susan Dumais on conversational search. |