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 starting to look for postdocs, 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
  • Content analysis in social media
  • Semantic search in e-discovery
  • Search results diversification
  • Recommender systems
Natural Language Processing
  • Dialogue systems
  • Question-answering
  • Summarization

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

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Gaurav Pandey, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhaochun Ren and Yi Chang. Vectorization of Pairwise Item Preferences. In ECIR'19, Cologne, Germany, 2019.
  6. Xiang Li, Ben Kao, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin. Spectral Clustering in Heterogeneous Information Networks. In AAAI'19, Hawaii, USA, 2019
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 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.
  12. Gaurav Pandey, Zhaochun Ren, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jari Veijalainen, Maarten de Rijke. Linear feature extraction for ranking. In Information Retrieval Journal, 2018. Accepted.
  13. 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.
  14. Shuman Liu, Hongshen Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Yang Feng, Dawei Yin. Knowledge Diffusion for Neural Dialogue Generation. In ACL'18, Melbourne, Australia, 2018.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Shangsong Liang, Ilya Markov, Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. Manifold Learning for Rank Aggregation. In WWW'18, Lyon, France, 2018.
  19. 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)
  20. 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)
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Emine Yilmaz, Evangelos Kanoulas. Collaborative User Clustering for Short Text Streams. In AAAI'17, San Francisco, 2017.
  25. 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
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. Shangsong Liang, Fei Cai, Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. Efficient Structured Learning for Personalized Diversification. In TKDE, 2016.
  29. Zhaochun Ren, Shangsong Liang, Piji Li, Shuaiqiang Wang, Maarten de Rijke. Social Collaborative Viewpoint Regression with Explainable Recommendations. In WSDM'17, Cambridge, 2017.
  30. Zhaochun Ren. Monitoring Social Media: Summarization, Classification and Recommendation. University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October, 2016. ISBN: 978-94-6182-721-0
  31. Zhaochun Ren, Oana Inel, Lora Aroyo, Maarten de Rijke. Time-aware Multi-Viewpoint Summarization of Multilingual Social Text Streams. In CIKM'16, Indianapolis, 2016.
  32. Yafang Wang, Zhaochun Ren, Martin Theobald, Maximilian Dylla, Gerard de Melo. Summary Generation for Temporal Extractions. In DEXA, 2016.
  33. Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Jun Ma, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhiwei Zhang, Zhaochun Ren. User Session Level Diverse Reranking of Search Results. In Neurocomputing, 2016.
  34. 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.
  35. Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. Summarizing Contrastive Themes via Hierarchical Non-Parametric Processes. In SIGIR'15, Santiago de Chile, 2015.
  36. 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.
  37. Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Wouter Weerkamp, Edgar Meij, Maarten de Rijke. Time-Aware Rank Aggregation for Microblog Search. In CIKM'14, Shanghai, 2014.
  38. Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. Personalized Search Result Diversification via Structured Learning. In KDD'14, New York, 2014.
  39. Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Maarten de Rijke. Fusion Helps Diversification. In SIGIR'14, Gold coast, 2014.
  40. 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.
  41. 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.
  42. Zhaochun Ren, Shangsong Liang, Edgar Meij, Maarten de Rijke. Personalized Time-aware Tweets Summarization. In SIGIR'13, Dublin, 2013.
  43. 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.
  44. Yafang Wang, Maximilian Dylla, Zhaochun Ren, Marc Spaniol, Gerhard Weikum. PRAVDA-live: interactive knowledge harvesting. In CIKM'12, Maui, 2012.
  45. Zhaochun Ren, Jun Ma, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yang Liu. Summarizing web forum threads based on a latent topic propagation process. In CIKM'11, Glasgow, 2011.
  46. 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
  • The Innovation Scholarship, Shandong University, 2010
  • Scholarship of Shandong University for Undergraduates, 2006-2008
  • Weichai Power Scholarship, Shandong University, 2007

Invited tutorials

  • Zhaochun Ren, Xiangnan He, Dawei Yin, Maarten de Rijke. Information Discovery in E-commerce. In SIGIR'18, Ann Arbor, USA, 2018.
  • Zhaochun Ren. Search and Content Analysis in E-commerce. In CCIR'18, Guilin, China, 2018.

Competition Awards

  • First-Class Award of China Graduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (CGMCM), 2010, (Top 3%)
  • First-Class Award of China UndergraduateMathematical Contest inModeling(CUMCM) of Shandong Province, 2008
  • Honorable Mentions of Mathematical Contest in Modeling, 2008

Professional Activities

  • 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
  • Publicity Co-chair, WSDM 2018
  • Program committee, NLPCC 2019
  • Program committee, EMNLP 2019
  • Program committee, ACL 2019
  • Program committee, SIGIR 2019
  • Program committee, AAAI 2019
  • Program committee, WSDM 2019
  • Program committee, COLING 2018
  • Program committee, EMNLP 2018
  • Program committee, CIKM 2018
  • Program committee, SIGIR 2018
  • Program committee, ACL 2018
  • Program committee, WWW 2018
  • Workshop committee, WSDM 2018
  • Program committee, WSDM 2018
  • Program committee, CIKM 2017
  • Program committee, ACL 2017
  • Program committee, SIGIR 2017
  • Short paper committee, SIGIR 2017
  • Program committee, EACL 2017
  • Program committee, AIRS 2016
  • Program committee, CCL 2016
  • Short paper committee, SIGIR 2016
  • Program committee, ACL 2016
  • Program committee, CIKM 2015
  • Short paper committee, SIGIR 2015
  • Proceedings chair, ECIR 2014
  • 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, PLOS One, from 2017 to now
  • Reviewer, Information Retrieval Journal, from 2016 to now
  • Reviewer, Neurocomputing, from 2016 to now

Patents

  • 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

Supervision

1. Shen Gao

Shen is a first-year PhD student from Peking University, supervised by Prof. Dongyan Zhao and Dr. Rui Yan. He worked as a research intern at Data Science Lab, JD.com in 2018. Shen was working on Question-answering and summarization.

2. Zhaonian Cai

Zhaonian is a first-year PhD student from Jilin University, supervised by Prof. Yi Chang. He is now a research intern at Data Science Lab, JD.com. Zhaonian is working on Opinion summarization.

3. Bo Cheng

Bo is a first-year PhD student from Jilin University, supervised by Prof. Yi Chang. He is now a research intern at Data Science Lab, JD.com. Bo is working on Community detection.

4. Yuanxing Liu

Yuanxing is a first-year PhD student from Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), supervised by Prof. Ting Liu and Dr. Weinan Zhang. He is now a research intern at Data Science Lab, JD.com. Yuanxing is working on Explainable recommendation.

5. Changfeng Sun

Changfeng is a first-year M.Sc student from Shandong University (SDU), co-supervised by Prof. Liqiang Nie and me. Changfeng is working on Session-based recommendation.

6. Yao Ma

Yao is a third-year PhD candidate from Michigan State University (MSU), supervised by Prof. Jiliang Tang. Yao worked as a research intern at Data Science Lab, JD.com during 2017-2018. Yao worked on Network embedding during his internship.

7. Wenqiang Lei

Wenqiang is a final-year PhD candidate from National University of Singapore, supervised by Dr. Min-Yen Kan. Wenqiang worked as a research intern at Data Science Lab, JD.com during 2017-2018. He worked on dialogue generation during his internship.

8. Shuman Liu

Shuman is a fourth-year PhD candidate from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, supervised by Prof. Qun Liu. Shuman worked as a research intern at Data Science Lab, JD.com during 2017-2018. She worked on dialogue generation during her internship.

9. Xisen Jin

Xisen is a third-year undergraduate from Fudan University. Xisen worked as a research intern at JD.com during 2017-2018. He worked on dialogue generation during his internship.

10. Zihan Wang

Zihan worked as a research intern at Data Science Lab, JD.com during 2017. He worked on product relation prediction during his internship. Zihan is now a second-year M.Sc student from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, supervised by Prof. Bin Wang and Dr. Quan Wang.

11. Jing Li

Jing got his M.Sc degree from Shandong University (SDU) in 2018, co-supervised by Prof. Jun Ma, Dr. Zhumin Chen, and me. Jing worked on Session-based recommendation. Jing works at Shandong provincial government.

12. Pengjie Ren

Pengjie got his PhD degree from Shandong University (SDU) in 2018, co-supervised by Prof. Jun Ma, Dr. Zhumin Chen, and me. Pengjie worked on Summarization, Ranking, and Recommendation. Pengjie works at University of Amsterdam, supervised by Prof. Maarten de Rijke.

13. Hongshen Chen

Hongshen is now a research scientist at Data Science Lab, JD.com. Hongshen got his PhD from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017, supervised by Prof. Qun Liu. Hongshen worked with me during 2016-2018 for research projects about dialogue systems in JD.com.

14. Zhengyi Yang

Zhengyi got his M.Sc degree from University College London (UCL) in 2017, co-supervised by Prof. Ingemar Cox and me. Zhengyi worked on recommendation and graph mining. He is now studying as a first-year PhD student at University of New South Wales (UNSW), supervised by Prof. Xuemin Lin.

15. Yukun Zhao

Yukun got his M.Sc degree from Shandong University (SDU) in 2017, co-supervised by Prof. Jun Ma and me. Yukun worked on Explainable user clustering. Yukun is an algorithm engineer (applied research scientist) at JD.com.

16. Hongya Song

Hongya got his M.Sc degree from Shandong University (SDU) in 2017, co-supervised by Prof. Jun Ma, and me. Hongya worked on Question-answering. Hongya works at Huawei Co. Ltd.

17. John Aivalis

John got his M.Sc degree from University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 2017, co-supervised by Prof. Maarten de Rijke and me. John worked on Recommendation.