School of Computer Science and Technology
Shandong University
Address: 408-1, N3 Building, 72th Binhai Road, Qingdao, China
E-mail: zhaochun.ren@sdu.edu.cn

About me

I'm now working as a professor at Shandong University. Prior to this, I worked as a senior research manager at JD.com and a research associate in University College London. I got my PhD from University of Amsterdam, supervised by Prof. Dr. Maarten de Rijke. I am interested in information retrieval, social media mining and natural language processing. Before joining UvA, I received my B.E and M.E from Shandong University in 2009 and 2012 respectively, and worked as a short-term visiting scholar in Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, 2012.

I am looking for short-term research interns, master students, and PhD students. Please contact me if you are interested in working with me. The School of Computer Science and Technology (计算机科学与技术学院) of Shandong University is also actively hiring tenure-track faculties, which provides competitive salary and good career opportunities.

Research Interests

Information Retrieval
  • Recommender systems
  • Conversational IR
  • Personalized search and QA
  • Legal IR systems and applications
  • Interactive IR applications
Natural Language Processing
  • Dialogue systems
  • Summarization
  • Knowledge representation and distillation

Working Experience

  • 2012 : Visiting Scholar in Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany.
  • 2016 - 2017: Research Associate in University College London, supervised by Prof. Ingemar Cox.
  • 2017 - 2019: Research Scientist in the Data Science Lab at JD.com, China.
  • 2018 - 2019: Senior Research Manager at JD.com, China.

Education

  • 2012 - 2016: PhD in ILPS, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Maarten de Rijke
  • 2009 - 2012: M.E. in Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Supervisor: Prof. Jun Ma .
  • 2005 - 2009: B.E. in Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University.

Selected Publications (My Google Scholar Profile)

    * Corresponding author
  1. Qiannan Cheng, Zhaochun Ren*, Yujie Lin, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Xiangyuan Liu, Maarten de Rijke. Long Short-Term Session Search: Joint Personalized Reranking and Next Query Prediction. In The Web Conference 2021, Online, 2021
  2. Dan Li, Zhaochun Ren*, Evangelos Kanoulas‬. CrowdGP: a Gaussian Process Model for Inferencing Relevance from Crowd Annotations. In The Web Conference 2021, Online, 2021
  3. Qintong Li, Piji Li, Xinyi Li, Zhaochun Ren*, Zhumin Chen, Maarten de Rijke. Abstractive Opinion Tagging. In WSDM 2021, Online, 2021
  4. Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren*, Evangelos Kanoulas‬, Christof Monz, Maarten de Rijke. Conversations with Search Engines. In ACM TOIS, Accepted, 2021
  5. Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Dongyan Zhao. Meaningful Answer Generation of E-Commerce Question-Answering. In ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) 39 (2), 1-26 2021, 2021
  6. Qintong Li, Hongshen Chen, Zhaochun Ren*, Zhumin Chen, Zhaopeng Tu, Jun Ma. EmpDG: Multi-resolution Interactive Empathetic Dialogue Generation. In COLING 2020, Online, 2020
  7. Yongquan He, Zhihan Wang, Peng Zhang, Zhaopeng Tu, Zhaochun Ren*. VN Network: Embedding Newly Emerging Entities with Virtual Neighbors. In CIKM 2020, Online, 2020
  8. Meng Zhou, Jingbo Zhou, Yanjie Fu, Zhaochun Ren, Xiaoli Wang, Hui Xiong. Description Generation for Points of Interest. In ICDE 2021, Crete, Greece, 2020
  9. Yujie Lin, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Dongxiao Yu, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke, Xiuzhen Cheng. Keywords Generation Improves E-Commerce Session-based Recommendation. In SIGIR 2020, Online, 2020
  10. Yao Ma, Ziyi Guo, Zhaochun Ren, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin. Learning Dynamic Node Representations with Graph Neural Networks. In SIGIR 2020, Online, 2020
  11. Chuan Meng, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Weiwei Sun, Zhaochun Ren, Zhaopeng Tu, Maarten de Rijke, Xiuzhen Cheng. DukeNet: A Dual Knowledge Interaction Network for Knowledge-Grounded Conversation. In SIGIR 2020, Online, 2020
  12. Shanshan Wang, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Jian-Yun Nie, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke, Xiuzhen Cheng. Coding Electronic Health Records with Adversarial Reinforcement Path Generation. In SIGIR 2020, Online, 2020
  13. Jinhuan Liu, Xuemeng Song, Zhaochun Ren, Zhaopeng Tu, Jun Ma and Liqiang Nie. Auxiliary Template-Enhanced Generative Compatibility Modeling. In IJCAI 2020, Online, 2020
  14. Yuanxing Liu, Zhaochun Ren*, Wei-Nan Zhang, Wanxiang Che, Ting Liu and Dawei Yin. Keywords Generation Improves E-Commerce Session-based Recommendation. In The Web Conference 2020
  15. Changfeng Sun, Han Liu, Meng Liu, Zhaochun Ren*, Tian Gan, Liqiang Nie. LARA: Attribute-to-feature Adversarial Learning for New-item Recommendation. In WSDM 2020, Houston, USA, 2020
  16. Shanshan Wang, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke. Order-free Medicine Combination Prediction With Graph Convolutional Reinforcement Learning. In CIKM 2019, Beijing, China, 2019
  17. Weijian Chen, Yulong Gu, Zhaochun Ren, Xiangnan He, Hongtao Xie, Tong Guo, Dawei Yin & Yongdong Zhang. Semi-supervised User Profiling with Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks. In IJCAI 2019, Macau, China, 2019
  18. Zihan Wang, Zhaochun Ren, Chunyu He, Peng Zhang, Yue Hu. Robust Embedding with Multi-Level Structures for Link Prediction. In IJCAI 2019, Macau, China, 2019
  19. Yujie Lin, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Jun Ma and Maarten de Rijke. Improving Outfit Recommendation with Co-supervision of Fashion Generation. In The Web Conference 2019 (WWW 2019), San Francisco, USA, 2019
  20. Qiang Zhang, Shangsong Liang, Aldo Lipani, Zhaochun Ren and Emine Yilmaz. From Stances’ Imbalance to their Hierarchical Representation and Detection. In The Web Conference 2019 (WWW 2019), San Francisco, USA, 2019
  21. Gaurav Pandey, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhaochun Ren and Yi Chang. Vectorization of Pairwise Item Preferences. In ECIR'19, Cologne, Germany, 2019.
  22. Xiang Li, Ben Kao, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin. Spectral Clustering in Heterogeneous Information Networks. In AAAI'19, Hawaii, USA, 2019
  23. Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Piji Li, Zhaochun Ren, Lidong Bing, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan. Abstractive Text Summarization by Incorporating Reader Comments. In AAAI'19, Hawaii, USA, 2019
  24. Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Jing Li, Zhaochun Ren, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke. RepeatNet: A Repeat Aware Neural Recommendation Machine for Session-based Recommendation. In AAAI'19, Hawaii, USA, 2019
  25. Jin Huang, Zhaochun Ren, Wayne Xin Zhao, Gaole He, Ji-Rong Wen and Daxiang Dong. Taxonomy-aware Multi-hop Reasoning Networks for Sequential Recommendation. In WSDM'19, Melbourne, Australia, 2019
  26. Shen Gao, Zhaochun Ren, Yihong Eric Zhao, Dongyan Zhao, Dawei Yin and Rui Yan. Product-Aware Answer Generation in E-Commerce Question-Answering. In WSDM'19, Melbourne, Australia, 2019
  27. Xisen Jin, Wenqiang Lei, Zhaochun Ren, Hongshen Chen, Shangsong Liang, Yihong Eric Zhao, Dawei Yin. Explicit State Tracking with Semi-Supervision for Neural Dialogue Generation. In CIKM'18, Turin, Italy, 2018.
  28. Gaurav Pandey, Zhaochun Ren, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jari Veijalainen, Maarten de Rijke. Linear feature extraction for ranking. In Information Retrieval Journal, 2018. Accepted.
  29. Wenqiang Lei, Xisen Jin, Zhaochun Ren, Xiangnan He, Min-Yen Kan, Dawei Yin. Sequicity: Simplifying Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Single Sequence-to-Sequence Architectures. In ACL'18, Melbourne, Australia, 2018.
  30. Shuman Liu, Hongshen Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Yang Feng, Dawei Yin. Knowledge Diffusion for Neural Dialogue Generation. In ACL'18, Melbourne, Australia, 2018.
  31. Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Liqiang Nie, Furu Wei, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke. Sentence Relations for Extractive Summarization with Deep Neural Networks. In TOIS, Accepted. 2018.
  32. Zhaochun Ren* (co-first author), Hongshen Chen, Jiliang Tang, Yihong Eric Zhao, Dawei Yin. Hierarchical Variational Memory Network for Dialogue Generation. In WWW'18, Lyon, France, 2018.
  33. Zhaochun Ren* (co-first author), Yao Ma, Ziheng Jiang, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin. Multi-dimensional network embedding with hierarchical structures. In WSDM'18, Los Angeles, USA, 2018.
  34. Shangsong Liang, Ilya Markov, Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. Manifold Learning for Rank Aggregation. In WWW'18, Lyon, France, 2018.
  35. Zihan Wang, Ziheng Jiang, Zhaochun Ren, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin. A Path-constrained Framework for Discriminating Substitutable and Complementary Products in E-commerce. In WSDM'18, Los Angeles, USA, 2018. (Best Student Paper Award)
  36. Jing Li, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Jun Ma. Neural Attentive Session-based Recommendation. In CIKM'17, Singapore 2017. (Best Full Paper Runner Up Award)
  37. Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Furu Wei, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke. Leveraging Contextual Sentence Relations for Extractive Summarization Using a Neural Attention Model. In SIGIR'17, Tokyo, Japan 2017.
  38. Piji Li, Zihao Wang, Zhaochun Ren, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam. Neural Rating Regression with Abstractive Tips Generation for Recommendation. In SIGIR'17, Tokyo, Japan 2017.
  39. Bin Zhou, Vasileios Lampos, Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Emine Yilmaz, Ingemar Cox. A Concept Language Model for Ad-hoc Search. In WWW'17, Perth, Australia, 2017.
  40. Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Emine Yilmaz, Evangelos Kanoulas. Collaborative User Clustering for Short Text Streams. In AAAI'17, San Francisco, 2017.
  41. Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren* (corresponding author), Yukun Zhao, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke. Inferring Dynamic User Interests in Streams of Short Text for User Clustering. In TOIS , 2017
  42. Piji Li, Zihao Wang, Wai Lam, Zhaochun Ren, Lidong Bing. Salience Estimation via Variational Auto-Encoders for Multi-Document Summarization. In AAAI'17, San Francisco, 2017.
  43. Zhaochun Ren*(co-first author), Hongya Song, Shangsong Liang, Piji Li, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke. Summarizing Answers in Non-Factoid Community Question-Answering. In WSDM'17, Cambridge, 2017.
  44. Shangsong Liang, Fei Cai, Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. Efficient Structured Learning for Personalized Diversification. In TKDE, 2016.
  45. Zhaochun Ren, Shangsong Liang, Piji Li, Shuaiqiang Wang, Maarten de Rijke. Social Collaborative Viewpoint Regression with Explainable Recommendations. In WSDM'17, Cambridge, 2017.
  46. Zhaochun Ren. Monitoring Social Media: Summarization, Classification and Recommendation. University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October, 2016. ISBN: 978-94-6182-721-0
  47. Zhaochun Ren, Oana Inel, Lora Aroyo, Maarten de Rijke. Time-aware Multi-Viewpoint Summarization of Multilingual Social Text Streams. In CIKM'16, Indianapolis, 2016.
  48. Yafang Wang, Zhaochun Ren, Martin Theobald, Maximilian Dylla, Gerard de Melo. Summary Generation for Temporal Extractions. In DEXA, 2016.
  49. Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Jun Ma, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhiwei Zhang, Zhaochun Ren. User Session Level Diverse Reranking of Search Results. In Neurocomputing, 2016.
  50. Zhaochun Ren*(co-first author), Yukun Zhao*, Shangsong Liang*, Jun Ma, Emine Yilmaz, Maarten de Rijke. Explainable User Clustering in Short Text Streams. In SIGIR'16, Pisa, 2016.
  51. Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. Summarizing Contrastive Themes via Hierarchical Non-Parametric Processes. In SIGIR'15, Santiago de Chile, 2015.
  52. Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Jun Ma, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhiwei Zhang, Zhaochun Ren. Mining and Ranking Users' Intents behind Queries. In Information Retrieval Journal, in press. DOI: 10.1007/s10791-015-9271-1.
  53. Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Wouter Weerkamp, Edgar Meij, Maarten de Rijke. Time-Aware Rank Aggregation for Microblog Search. In CIKM'14, Shanghai, 2014.
  54. Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. Personalized Search Result Diversification via Structured Learning. In KDD'14, New York, 2014.
  55. Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. Fusion Helps Diversification. In SIGIR'14, Gold coast, 2014.
  56. Zhaochun Ren, Maria-Hendrike Peetz, Shangsong Liang, Willemijn van Dolen, Maarten de Rijke. Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification of Social Text Streams. In SIGIR'14, Gold coast, 2014.
  57. Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. The Impact Of Semantic Document Expansion On Cluster-Based Fusion For Microblog Search. In ECIR'14, Amsterdam, 2014.
  58. Zhaochun Ren, Shangsong Liang, Edgar Meij, Maarten de Rijke. Personalized Time-aware Tweets Summarization. In SIGIR'13, Dublin, 2013.
  59. Chaoran Cui, Jun Ma, Tao Lian, Xiaofang Wang, Zhaochun Ren. Ranking-Oriented Nearest-Neighbor Based Method for Automatic Image Annotation. In SIGIR'13, Dublin, 2013.
  60. Yafang Wang, Maximilian Dylla, Zhaochun Ren, Marc Spaniol, Gerhard Weikum. PRAVDA-live: interactive knowledge harvesting. In CIKM'12, Maui, 2012.
  61. Zhaochun Ren, Jun Ma, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yang Liu. Summarizing web forum threads based on a latent topic propagation process. In CIKM'11, Glasgow, 2011.
  62. Zhaochun Ren, Jun Ma, Gang Wang, Chaoran Cui, Xiaohui Han. Dynamically Modeling Semantic Dependencies in Web Forum Threads.. In WI'11, Lyon, 2011.

Scholarships and Awards

  • WSDM 2019 Outstanding PC award
  • WSDM 2018 best student paper award
  • CIKM 2017 best full paper runner up award
  • 2015 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad (国家自费留学生奖学金)
  • SIGIR 2015 student travel grant
  • SIGIR 2014 student travel grant
  • SIGIR 2013 student travel grant
  • Scholarship of Shandong University for Undergraduates, 2006-2009

Invited tutorials

Professional Activities

  • Editor, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) Special Section on Graph Technologies for User Modeling and Recommendation
  • Editorial board member, Journal of Information Processing and Management (IPM)
  • Editor, Journal of Information Processing and Management (IPM) Special Issue on Deep Learning for IR
  • Co-Organizer, WSDM 2019 workshop on Deep Matching in Practical Applications, WSDM 2020 workshop on natural language processing for recommendations, SIGIR 2020 workshop on Applied Interactive Information Systems
  • General Co-Chair, YSSNLP 2021
  • Orgnization Comittee Chair, YSSNLP 2020
  • Sponsorship Co-chair, SIGIR 2021
  • Sponsorship Co-chair, NLPCC 2021
  • Publicity Co-chair, WSDM 2018
  • Publicity Co-chair, WSDM 2018
  • Proceedings Chair, CCIR 2019
  • Proceedings Chair, ECIR 2014
  • Senior Program committee, IJCAI 2021, ECML-PKDD 2020
  • Program committee, SIGIR 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017
  • Program committee, ACL 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016
  • Program committee, WSDM 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018
  • Program committee, The WebConf (WWW) 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018
  • Program committee, AAAI 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017
  • Program committee, IJCAI 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018
  • Program committee, EMNLP 2020, 2019, 2018
  • Program committee, CIKM 2020, 2019, 2018, 2015
  • Program committee, NLPCC 2020, 2019
  • Program committee, COLING 2020, 2018
  • Program committee, EACL 2021, 2017
  • Program committee, CCL 2020, 2019, 2016
  • Program committee, ICTIR 2020
  • Information director, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM TOIS), 2014-2017
  • Reviewer, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM TOIS), from 2014 to now
  • Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE), from 2016 to now
  • Reviewer, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), from 2017 to now
  • Reviewer, Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DMKD), from 2017 to now
  • Reviewer, Journal of Information Processing and Management (IPM), from 2013 to now
  • Reviewer, Information Science, from 2017 to now
  • Reviewer, Information Retrieval Journal, from 2016 to now
  • Reviewer, Neurocomputing, from 2016 to now

Patents

  • A kind of text snippet automatic generation method and system based on temporal knowledge extraction, CN106055542B
  • 对话系统处理方法、装置、设备及可读存储介质, CN109582767A
  • The cross-domain Parallel Sequence recommended method of information, medium and equipment based on shared account, CN110032684A
  • 一种会话推荐方法、系统、设备及介质, CN110008408A
  • 融合评论的可解释性服装推荐方法、系统、设备及介质, CN109754317A
  • Information pushing method and device, CN107506495A
  • 一种基于时间知识抽取的文本摘要自动生成方法及系统, CN106055542A

I'm now working as the leader of the Professor team on computer science, Taishan College, Shandong Univerisity.

  • 2019 Fall, SD01332190 Social Network and Social Media Analysis
  • 2020, 2021 Spring, SD01332090 Introduction to Data Science
  • 2020 Spring, Information Retrieval

Supervision

PhD & M.Sc Supervision in Shandong University

    Xiaoyu Zhang (M.Sc student, from 2021)

    Weiwei Sun (M.Sc student, from 2021)

    Zhi Tian (M.Sc student, from 2020)

    Mengxue Zhao (M.Sc student, from 2020)

    Na Huang (M.Sc student, from 2020)

    Yiqing Liu (M.Sc student, from 2020)

    Xiangyuan Liu (M.Sc student, from 2020)

    Yanchao Wang (M.Sc student, from 2020)

    Yougang Lv (PhD student, from 2021)

    Zihan Wang (PhD student, from 2020)

    Qiannan Cheng (Co-advisor, M.Sc student from 2018, she will join Alibaba.)

    Yue Feng (Mentor at Baidu 2019-2020, she studies as a PhD student at University College London.)

    Dongdong Li (Co-advisor, M.Sc student from 2018)

    Qintong Li (Co-advisor, M.Sc student from 2018, she will study as a PhD student at The University of Hong Kong.)

    Minghong Xu (Co-advisor, M.Sc student from 2018, she will join Baidu.)

    Changfeng Sun (Co-advisor, (Co-advisor, M.Sc student 2017-2020, he studies as a PhD student in Xi'an Jiaotong University.)

Undergraduate Supervision in Shandong University

    Shicheng Bei (2016, M.Sc student at UC Santa Diego, USA)

    Qitao Shen (2016, M.Sc student at Rice Univeristy, USA)

    Minxing Zhang (2016, PhD student at Saarland University, Germany)

    Xi Li (2017, PhD student at Renmin University.)

    Lifan Zhao (2017, PhD student at Shandong University.)

    Yougang Lv (2017， PhD student at Shandong University.)

    Feifan Song (2017, PhD student at Peking University.)

    Zhiwei Zhang (2017, PhD student at Shanghai Jiaotong University.)

    Weiwei Sun (2017, M.Sc student at Shandong University.)

    Mingruo Yuan (2017, PhD student at The University of Hong Kong.)

    Yulong Huang (2018)

    Qingyang Liu (2018)

    Minghui Tian (2018)

    Shiguang Wu (2019)

    Zijian Meng (2019)

Supervision before joining Shandong University

    Shen Gao(PKU, CHINA), Zhaonian Cai(JHU, CHINA), Bo Cheng(JHU, CHINA), Yuanxing Liu (HIT, CHINA), Yao Ma(MSU, USA), Wenqiang Lei (NUS, Singapore), Shuman Liu (CAS, CHINA), Xisen Jin (USC, USA), Zihan Wang (CAS, CHINA), Jing Li (Shandong Public Security Department, CHINA), Pengjie Ren (UvA, The Netherlands), Hongshen Chen (JD.com, CHINA), Zhengyi Yang (NSWU, Australia), Yukun Zhao (Alibaba, China)， Hongya Song （Huawei, CHINA）, Jin Huang (UvA, The Netherlands), John Aivalis (UvA, The Netherlands)

Projects

  • 国家重点研发计划“基于新闻报道场景的AI辅助写稿机器人系统研发” 课题负责人，2020YFB1406704, 2020-2023
  • 数字化场景下面向推荐系统的对话生成研究，NSFC 61902219，2020-2022
  • Qilu Youth Scholar Funding, Shandong University, 2019-2023
  • Knowledge-aware dialogue generation research，Tencent Rhino-Bird Focused Research Project (腾讯犀牛鸟专项研究基金)，2019-2020
  • 科大讯飞认知国家重点实验室开放基金, 2019-2020
  • 自然语言生成研究，山东大学国际合作基金，2019-2023
  • 青年交叉团队基金，山东大学，2020-2025