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Rishiraj Saha Roy

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Rishiraj Saha Roy

Rishiraj Saha Roy

Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
Department 5: Databases and Information Systems
 office: Campus E1 4, Room 426
Saarland Informatics Campus
66123 Saarbrücken
Germany
 email: Get my email address via email
 phone: +49 681 9325-5108

About

I moved to Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, Germany in January 2024. This page is no longer actively maintained.

Rishiraj Saha Roy is a Senior Researcher (Research Group Leader) at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII), Saarbruecken, Germany, leading the research group on Question Answering. He belongs to the Databases and Information Systems Department, that is headed by MPII director Prof. Dr. Gerhard Weikum. Most recently, he has zoomed in on using graph neural networks (for leveraging heterogeneous knowledge sources) and deep reinforcement learning (for harnessing user feedback) to build better conversational question answering systems. In general, he is really passionate about applying language technology in and around text-based search. Prior to joining MPII, he worked for one and a half years as a Computer Scientist at Adobe Research. He completed his PhD as a Microsoft Research India PhD Fellow from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, working under the supervision of Prof. Niloy Ganguly (IIT Kharagpur) and Dr. Monojit Choudhury (Microsoft Research). He did his masters' at IIT Roorkee (Roorkee is a beautiul town near Hardwar, India) and his bachelors' at Jadavpur University , Kolkata (also known as the City of Joy!), India. When not working, he can often be found poring over all kinds of word, math, and logic puzzles.

What's New?

Research Interests

Selected Publications

[Google Scholar] [DBLP] [QA Project Overview] [QA Project Complete Listing]

Patents

Employment Positions

Education

Recognitions

Professional Activities

  • Selected conference reviewing: Senior Area Chair: ACL (2023); Senior PC: AAAI (2021 - 2022); PC: WSDM (2021 - 2022; 2024), WWW (2022), SIGIR (2019 - 2021, 2023), CIKM (2020 - 2021), AAAI (2020), IJCAI (2021), ACL (2020 - 2021), EMNLP (2017 - 2021), NAACL-HLT (2019 - 2021).
  • Publications Chair of ACM COMPASS, 16 - 19 August 2023, Cape Town, South Africa.
  • Selection committee member for Masters' Students for the Computer Science Department at the Saarland University. (2019 - 2022)
  • Publications Chair of CoDS-COMAD 2020, 5 - 7 January 2020, Hyderabad, India.
  • Co-organizer of the IR Track at KSE 2019, 24 - 26 October 2019, Da Nang, Vietnam. (with Md. Zia Ullah)
  • Co-editor of Dynamics On and Of Complex Networks III, Springer, 16 June 2019 (with Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad, Fariba Karimi, Jean-Charles Delvenne, and Bivas Mitra).
  • Co-organizer of the DOOCN 2019, 28 May 2019, Vermont, USA. (with Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad, Parantapa Bhattacharya, and Sandipan Sikdar)
  • Co-organizer of the COMSNETS SN 2019, 11 January 2019, Bangalore, India. (with Saptarshi Ghosh)
  • Publications Chair of CoDS-COMAD 2019, 3 - 5 January 2019.
  • Co-organizer of the DOOCN 2018, 27 September 2018, Thessaloniki, Greece. (with Jean-Charles Delvenne, Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad, Fariba Karimi, Bivas Mitra, and Parantapa Bhattacharya)
  • Co-organizer of the COMSNETS SN 2018, 7 January 2018, Bangalore, India. (with Moumita Sinha)
  • Co-organizer of the DOOCN 2017, 19 June 2017, Indianapolis, USA. (with Jean-Charles Delvenne, Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad, Fariba Karimi, and Bivas Mitra)
  • Co-organizer of the shared task on "Transliterated Search" at the FIRE 2013, 4 – 6 December 2013, New Delhi, India. (with Monojit Choudhury, Prasenjit Majumder, and Komal Agarwal)

Invited Talks

  • Invited talks on "New Directions in Conversational Question Answering" at Southwest Jiaotong University, China (16 March 2023), DRDO, India (25 January 2023), and IIT Bombay, India (14 April 2022).
  • Invited talks on "Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs" at Stevens Institute of Technology, USA (08 February 2023), and IIT Delhi, India (28 December 2020).
  • Invited talk on "Learning from Reformulations in Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs" at the Knowledge Graph Conference (KGC) 2022 (06 May 2022).
  • Invited talk on "Reinforcement Learning from Reformulations in Conversational Question Answering" at Lowe's Companies, Inc., Atlanta, USA (30 July 2021).
  • Invited talk on "Learning from User Feedback on Explanations to Improve Recommender Models" at Flipkart, Bangalore, India (29 April 2021).
  • Invited talk on "Graph Methods for Complex and Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Bases" at CEDAR (INRIA/LIX), Paris, France (26 November 2020).
  • Invited talk at the WSDM 2020 Workshop on Conversational Systems for E-Commerce Recommendations and Search (ConvERSe '20), Houston, USA (07 February 2020).
  • Invited talk on "Judicious Graph Exploration in Recommendation and Question Answering Systems" at IIT Kharagpur (02 January 2020).
  • Invited talks on "Complexity in Question Answering" at L3S Hannover (21 June 2019), Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (21 March 2019), Microsoft Research India (10 January 2019), and IIT Kharagpur (24 December 2018).
  • Invited talk on Answer Type Prediction for Question Answering at Adobe Research, Bangalore, India (16 December 2016).
  • Invited talk on Syntactic Complexity of Web Search Queries through the Lenses of Language Models, Networks and Users at the DOOCN 2016, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (20 September 2016).

Teaching

Students

PhD Students Masters' Students
  • Philipp Christmann (2020 - 2021)
  • Khanh Hiep Tran (2020 - 2021)
  • David Ziegler (2016 - 2017)
  • Sedigheh Eslami (2016 - 2017)
Bachelors' Students
  • Philipp Christmann (2018 - 2019)
  • Jana Schmidt (2017 - 2018)

Hobbies

  • Taekwondo
  • Hiking
  • Word, logic, and math puzzles
  • Table Tennis
  • Philately
  • Coin collection
  • Reading
  • Photography
  • Quizzing
  • Swimming