I am a researcher in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR). My research focus is text mining and information retrieval in specific domains.
I am a Full Professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS). I am group leader of Text Mining and Retrieval Leiden. I supervise projects that develop and evaluate NLP and IR methods in a diversity of domains. I am work package leader for two H2020 projects and project co-leader of the NWA project LESSEN.
My group works on novel methods for representation learning, ranking, and information extraction. I have a particular interest in the interconnection between retrieval and large language models (LLMs) and how they can strengthen each other, specifically in conversational search.
I am active in the NLP and IR communities, holding chairing positions in the large world-wide conferences. I was program co-chair for ECIR 2022, program co-chair for SIGIR 2025, and general co-chair for ECIR 2026. I am senior associate editor for TOIS, and Senior Area Chair for ARR (*ACL/EMNLP). Currently, I am workshop co-chair for WWW 2027, tutorial co-chair for EACL 2027, and short paper co-chair for ECIR 2027.
I collaborate with public and private partners such as the LUMC, KPN, Albert Heijn, ING, Randstad, ASML, Achmea, Signify, ZetaAlpha, and the TaalUnie. I am also a member of the ICAI lab AI4Oversight and lab director of the ICAI Lab LATTICE.
Vacancies:
None at the moment.
Message to prospective PhD students: The Dutch PhD system is position-based. This means you have to apply to advertised positions. When I have positions open, they will be posted here. Because of my already high supervision load, I am not accepting any external/scholarship students.
Interview on the podcast “Computers don’t byte” about my work: Spotify link.
