Martin Potthast

Call for Participation: Deadlines extended for UniAgent, the 1st Shared Task on Agentic AI in University Administration at the CIKM 2026 AnalytiCup in Rome. Registration until Oct 3, submission Oct 20. Real administrative cases; we host the LLMs. Details: uniagent.webis.de/cikm26/uniag...

🦁LION Lab is hiring! 🧑‍🔬One fully funded PhD student (TVL-13 100%) for 3 years 💉Topic: Interpretability for Protein Language Models 👥Advised by @weissweiler.bsky.social together with Clara Schoeder 🌍Leipzig, Germany 🔗Apply by Oct 15: lionlabnlp.github.io/jobs/ai4pf/ Please share! #NLProc #NLP

📣 The data for the UP2DATE@SCOLIA shared task about #systematicreview updates has now been released! Visit up2date.health-nlp.com for the details!

Call for Participation: UniAgent, the 1st Shared Task on Agentic AI in University Administration, at the CIKM 2026 AnalytiCup in Rome. Registration closes Sep 30. Submission deadline Oct 23. Details: uniagent.webis.de/cikm26/uniag...

Super happy that our paper “Topic-Specific Classifiers are Better Relevance Judges than Prompted LLMs” just won Best Student Paper at #SIGIR2026🏆 It argues against the reflex to reach for an LLM whenever you need relevance judgments. What we found 🧵:

I am happy to share that I defended my PhD thesis this week. I want to thank all the people I collaborated with and met at conferences and workshops over the years! Especially a big thank you to my PhD supervisor, Matthias Hagen, and to Laura Dietz and Udo Kruschwitz for reviewing my thesis.

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed.

No cheating, repost the most recent picture of your pet(s)

🧑‍🔬I’m recruiting PhD students in Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social Computer Science, together with @scadsai.bsky.social! Topics include, but aren’t limited to: 🔎Linguistic Interpretability 🌍Multilingual Evaluation 📖Computational Typology Please share! #NLProc #NLP

We just released "German Commons", the largest openly-licensed German text dataset for LLM training: 154B tokens with clear usage rights for research and commercial use. huggingface.co/datasets/coral-nlp/german-commons

🌟Really excited to share the fourth Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval (SWIRL) report published in SIGIR Forum! Paper 👉🏻 www.johannetrippas.com/papers/tripp... More info 👉🏻 sites.google.com/view/swirl20... #SWIRL2025 #SIGIR2026 #IR #GenAI #Research #CHIIR2026

Thrilled to announce that Matti Wiegmann has successfully defended his PhD! 🎉🧑‍🎓 Huge congratulations on this incredible achievement! #PhDDefense #AcademicMilestone

Honored to win the ICTIR Best Paper Honorable Mention Award for "Axioms for Retrieval-Augmented Generation"! Our new axioms are integrated with ir_axioms: github.com/webis-de/ir_... Nice to see axiomatic IR gaining momentum.

We presented two papers at ICTIR 2025 today: - Axioms for Retrieval-Augmented Generation webis.de/publications... - Learning Effective Representations for Retrieval Using Self-Distillation with Adaptive Relevance Margins webis.de/publications...

Want to know how to make bi-encoders more than 3x faster with a new backbone encoder model? Check out our talk on the Token-Independent Text Encoder (TITE) #SIGIR2025 in the efficiency track. It pools vectors within the model to improve efficiency dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Now @fschlatt.bsky.social presents "TITE: Token-Independent Text Encoder for Information Retrieval" at #SIGIR2025 Paper: webis.de/publications...

Here are some impressions from our ReNeuIR workshop on "Reaching Efficiency in Neural IR" that we had yesterday at #SIGIR2025.

Happy to share that our paper "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" received the Best Paper Honourable Mention at #SIGIR2025! Very grateful to the community for recognizing our work on improving RAG evaluation.  📄 webis.de/publications...

Lukas Gienapp presents "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" at #SIGIR2025 The paper is available at: webis.de/publications...

@mrparryparry.bsky.social presenting our work on reproducing TREC DL 2019 judgements and the implications for evaluating modern ranking models on modern collections. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.20937

Thank you Carlos for the shout-out of Lightning IR in the LSR tutorial at #SIGIR2025 If you want to fine your own LSR models, check out our framework at github.com/webis-de/lig...

From July 13-17, 2025, @scadsai.bsky.social will join the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Padua, Italy. Our researchers have made the following contributions. Learn more about #SIGIR2025: 👉 https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/

Do not forget to participate in the #TREC2025 Tip-of-the-Tongue (ToT) Track :) The corpus and baselines (with run files) are now available and easily accessible via the ir_datasets API and the HuggingFace Datasets API. More details are available at: trec-tot.github.io/guidelines

Our paper on self-distillation for training bi-encoders got accepted at #ICTIR2025! By exploiting pretrained encoder capabilities, our approach eliminates expensive teacher models and batch sampling while maintaining the same effectiveness.

Most reporting on AI examines worst-case systems deployed under the guise of efficiency. But what would a good faith effort at Ethical AI look like? For two years, we’ve been looking over the shoulder of a city trying to do things differently.

All @acm.org publications will be 100% Open Access as of January 2026. When we announced this at POPL and CHI this year, conference participants spontaneously erupted in applause. The CS community is excited about ACM's move to OA!

The deadline for submissions to the ReNeuIR workshop at #SIGIR2025 is extended to June 10 😸 Details: reneuir.org #ReNeuIr2025 #SIGIR25

PAN 2025 Call for Participation: Shared Tasks on Authorship Analysis, Computational Ethics, and Originality We'd like to invite you to participate in the following shared tasks at PAN 2025 held in conjunction with the CLEF conference in Madrid, Spain. Find out more at pan.webis.de/clef25/pan25...

We share your concern that LLMs could be prompted to generate responses that are biased in favor of certain products. That is why we are currently organizing a shared task on detecting advertisements in the responses of RAG-based search engines: bsky.app/profile/webi...

The fourth edition of ReNeuIR @ #SIGIR2025 is back!! Check reneuir.org to see what we have in mind this year! Paper submission deadline: May 20, 2025.

Can LLM-generated ads be blocked? With OpenAI adding shopping options to ChatGPT, this question gains further importance. If you are interested in contributing to the research on LLM-based advertising, please check out our shared task: touche.webis.de/clef25/touch... More details below.

New AI ethics scandal brewing... turns out a team at University of Zurich had dozens of undisclosed AI bot accounts debating with people on /r/ChangeMyView from November 2024 to March 2025 simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/...

📢 The Internet Archive needs your help. At a time when information is being rewritten or erased online, a $700 million lawsuit from major record labels threatens to destroy the Wayback Machine. Tell the labels to drop the 78s lawsuit. 👉 Sign our open letter: www.change.org/p/defend-the... 🧵⬇️

The Workshop on Open Web Search at #ECIR2025 just starts with a keynote by @claclarke.bsky.social on Annotative Indexing. #WOWS25 #WOWS2025 #ECIR25

The Workshop on Open Web Search just finished #WOWS2025 #ECIR2025. It was a very cool experience with many interesting talks. Lets hope we can do it again next year at #ECIR2026 in Delft :)

Honored to receive the best short paper award and best paper honourable mention award at #ECIR2025. Thank you to all co-authors @maik-froebe.bsky.social, @hscells.bsky.social, Shengyao Zhuang, @bevankoopman.bsky.social, Guido Zuccon, Benno Stein, @martin-potthast.com, @matthias-hagen.bsky.social 🥳

📢 Our paper "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" has been accepted to #SIGIR2025 ! We compared how good humans and LLMs are at writing and judging RAG responses, assembling 1800+ responses across 3 styles, and 47K+ pairwise judgments in 7 quality dimensions. 🧵➡️

1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world. 
I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.

Important Dates ---------------------- now Training Data Released May 23, 2025 Software submission May 30, 2025 Participant paper submission June 27, 2025 Peer review notification July 07, 2025 Camera-ready participant papers submission Sep 09-12, 2025 Conference

4. Generative Plagiarism Detection. Given a pair of documents, your task is to identify all contiguous maximal-length passages of reused text between them. pan.webis.de/clef25/pan25...

3. Multi-Author Writing Style Analysis. Given a document, determine at which positions the author changes. pan.webis.de/clef25/pan25...

2. Multilingual Text Detoxification. Given a toxic piece of text, re-write it in a non-toxic way while saving the main content as much as possible. pan.webis.de/clef25/pan25...

1. Voight-Kampff Generative AI Detection. Subtask 1: Given a (potentially obfuscated) text, decide whether it was written by a human or an AI. Subtask 2: Given a document collaboratively authored by human and AI, classify the extent to which the model assisted. pan.webis.de/clef25/pan25...

New preprint of WSDM demo by @maik_froebe @matthias and Ferdinand Schlatt Lightning IR: Straightforward Fine-tuning and Inference of Transformer-based Language Models for Information Retrieval https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04677 https://webis.de/lightning-ir/

Interested in joining our research group or do you know someone who might be interested? We have a new vacancy: Research position at the Webis group on Watermarking for Large Language Models. More information: webis.de/for-students...

Nearly there now - just a few hundred more days to go.

2nd International Workshop on Open Web Search: CfP We invite you to the #ECIR2025 Workshop on Open Web Search #wows2025. Please consider to submit to the scientific track or the WOWS-Eval shared task to enrich the Open Web Index with relevance judgments. Details: opensearchfoundation.org/wows2025

My advisor warned me that academics trend towards bitterness. He encouraged me to intentionally resist this, remember where I came from, and never forget the privilege of getting to spend a life working with knowledge and ideas. He too said that bitterness and resentment is easy.