Sean MacAvaney

I'm a Lecturer in Machine Learning at the University of Glasgow and a member of the Terrier Team. I did my PhD at Georgetown University under Nazli Goharian and Ophir Frieder, where I was a member of the IR Lab and an ARCS Endowed Scholar. My research focuses on applying machine learning to problems in IR and NLP. I've done research internships at AI2, CNR, Adobe, and MPI-INF. Before graduate school, I worked as a software developer at IIT/SourceTech.

I am currently looking for PhD students. Please contact me if interested.

News

2024-07-17

Our SIGIR 2024 paper A Reproducibility Study of PLAID received the Best Paper Runner Up Award

2023-07-25

Our SIGIR 2023 paper The Information Retrieval Experiment Platform received the Best Paper Award

2023-04-05

Our ECIR 2023 paper Doc2Query--: When Less is More received the Best Short Paper Award

2021-10-06

I'm starting as a Lecturer in Machine Learning at the University of Glasgow in December

2021-05-26
2021-03-24

I successfully defended my PhD dissertation

2020-12-15

I was awarded the AI2 Intern of the Year Award

more...
2020-05-03

With Arman Cohan and Nazli Goharian, we rocked Rounds 1 and 2 of COVID-Search

2020-04-22
2020-02-12

I passed my dissertation proposal

2020-02-05

I've released OpenNIR as a demo at WSDM 2020

2019-11-17

I'll be interning at AI2 this spring/summer in Seattle remotely

2019-04-14
2019-02-25

I was awarded the MWC ARCS Endowment Fellowship for 2019-20

2018-10-26

Our SMHD poster won first place at the 2018 ICBI Symposium

2018-10-15

Our paper Overcoming Low-Utility Facets for Complex Answer Retrieval was accepted in the Information Retrieval Journal Special Issue on Knowledge Graphs and Semantics in Text Analysis and Retrieval

2018-06-14

Our Self-reported Mental Health Diagnoses paper is recognized as an Area Chair Favorite Paper at COLING 2018

2018-04-11

I'll be presenting my work at SIGIR 2018 and NAACL 2018

2018-03-08

I'll be interning at Adobe Research this summer

2017-11-15
2017-10-27

I was awarded best poster (2nd place) at the 2017 ICBI Symposium

Education

MS Computer Science
PhD Computer Science
2016 – 2021
BS Software Engineering
2012 – 2016

Employment

Lecturer in Machine Learning
2021 – present
S2 Research Intern
Winter 2020
Research Intern
Summer 2019
NLP Research Intern
Summer 2018
Research Intern
Summer 2017
Software Developer
2009 – 2016

Featured Publications

James Mayfield, Eugene Yang, Dawn Lawrie, Sean MacAvaney, Paul McNamee, Douglas Oard, Luca Soldaini, Ian Soboroff, Orion Weller, Efsun Kayi, Kate Sanders, Marc Mason, Noah Hibbler
SIGIR 2024
Nominated for Best Paper pdf arxiv bibtex 3 citations perspective paper
Maik Fröbe, Harrisen Scells, Theresa Elstner, Christopher Akiki, Lukas Gienapp, Jan Heinrich Reimer, Sean MacAvaney, Benno Stein, Matthias Hagen, Martin Potthast
SIGIR 2024
Nominated for Best Paper link bibtex resource conference paper
Xuejun Chang, Debabrata Mishra, Craig Macdonald, Sean MacAvaney
SIGIR 2024
link bibtex slides long conference paper
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Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
(photo by Bart Desmet)