Zhaochun Ren

I’m now an Associate Professor at Leiden University, the Netherlands. I am interested in information retrieval and natural language processing, with an emphasis on conversational artificial intelligence, recommender systems, and social media analysis. I aim to develop intelligent agents that can address complex user requests and solve core challenges in NLP and IR towards that goal. I got my PhD from University of Amsterdam in 2016, supervised by Prof. Dr. Maarten de Rijke. Prior to that, 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.

Research interests

Information Retrieval:

• Recommender systems
• Conversational IR
• Generative retrieval
• Retrieval-argumented generation

Natural Language Processing:

• Dialogue systems
• Knowledge representation and distillation

Large Language Models:

• Trustworthy LLMs
• LLMs fine-tuning
• Tool learning and multi-agent with LLMs