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.

• [19 October 2023] Our full research paper Robust Training for Conversational Question Answering Models with Reinforced Reformulation Generation is accepted at WSDM 2024. [Website] [Code]
• [26 July 2023] Our full research paper Explainable Conversational Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sources via Iterative Graph Neural Networks was presented at SIGIR 2023. More info here.
• [13 July 2023] Updated manuscript available for UNIQORN, our explainable method for complex and heterogeneous QA (with Soumajit Pramanik, Jesujoba Alabi, and Gerhard Weikum).
• [22 June 2023] We have released CompMix, a new benchmark for heterogeneous QA (with Philipp Christmann and Gerhard Weikum).
• [22 June 2023] One-day virtual QA workshop with University of Hamburg, Germany (with Ricardo Usbeck).
• [17 June 2023] PC member for WSDM 2024.
• [14 April 2023] Our CLOCQ API for fast and easy access to Wikidata crosses 25 Million calls.
• [16 March 2023] Invited talk (virtual) on "New Directions in Conversational Question Answering" at Southwest Jiaotong University, China.
• [08 March 2023] My PhD student Azin Ghazimatin (jointly advised by Gerhard Weikum) awarded the prestigious GI DBIS Best Thesis Award, for dissertation titled Enhancing Explainability and Scrutability of Recommender Systems.
• [08 February 2023] Invited talk (virtual) on "Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs" at the Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, USA.

• Current focus: Question-answering over knowledge bases and text
• Parallel thread: Explainability and privacy in online recommenders
• General interests: Information retrieval, Natural language processing, Text mining

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

• M. Kaiser, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum, Robust Training for Conversational Question Answering Models with Reinforced Reformulation Generation, WSDM '24. [Preprint] [Website] [Code] [Slides] [Video]
• P. Christmann, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum, Explainable Conversational Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sources via Iterative Graph Neural Networks, SIGIR '23. [Preprint] [Code] [Slides] [Video] [User study]
• P. Christmann, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum, Conversational Question Answering on Heterogeneous Sources, SIGIR '22. [Preprint] [Benchmark+Demo] [Code] [Slides] [Poster] [Video] [ACM Badge]
• R. Saha Roy and A. Anand, Question Answering for the Curated Web Tasks and Methods in QA over Knowledge Bases and Text Collections, Springer, 2022.
• P. Christmann, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum, Beyond NED: Fast and Effective Search Space Reduction for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Bases, WSDM '22. [Preprint] [Website] [Code] [Slides] [Poster] [Video]
• Z. Jia, S. Pramanik, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum, Complex Temporal Question Answering on Knowledge Graphs, CIKM '21. [Preprint] [Data+Demo] [Code] [Slides] [Video] [Poster]
• M. Kaiser, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum, Reinforcement Learning from Reformulations in Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs, SIGIR '21. [Preprint] [Data+Demo] [Code] [Slides] [Video] [Poster] [ACM Badge]
• K. H. Tran, A. Ghazimatin, and R. Saha Roy, Counterfactual Explanations for Neural Recommenders, SIGIR '21. [Preprint] [Code] [Poster] [Slides] [Video] [ACM Badge]
• A. Ghazimatin, S. Pramanik, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum, ELIXIR: Learning from User Feedback on Explanations to Improve Recommender Models, WWW '21. [Preprint] [Data+Code] [Slides] [Video]
• R. Saha Roy and A. Anand, Question Answering over Curated and Open Web Sources, SIGIR '20. [Website] [Preprint] [Slides] [Video Part 1] [Video Part 2]
• M. Kaiser, R. Saha Roy and G. Weikum, Conversational Question Answering over Passages by Leveraging Word Proximity Networks, SIGIR '20. [Preprint] [Demo] [Code] [Video]
• A. Ghazimatin, O. Balalau, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum, PRINCE: Provider-side Interpretability with Counterfactual Explanations in Recommender Systems, WSDM '20. [Preprint] [Slides] [Poster] [Code] [Data] [Video]
• P. Christmann, R. Saha Roy, A. Abujabal, J. Singh, and G. Weikum, Look before you Hop: Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs Using Judicious Context Expansion, CIKM '19. [Preprint] [Data+Demo] [Code] [Slides] [Poster]
• X. Lu, S. Pramanik, R. Saha Roy, A. Abujabal, Y. Wang, and G. Weikum, Answering Complex Questions by Joining Multi-Document Evidence with Quasi Knowledge Graphs, SIGIR '19. [Preprint] [Video] [Slides] [Code+Data] [Demo] [TechCrunch] [VentureBeat]
• A. Abujabal, R. Saha Roy, M. Yahya, and G. Weikum, ComQA: A Community-sourced Dataset for Complex Factoid Question Answering with Paraphrase Clusters, NAACL-HLT '19. [Data] [Poster] [Preprint]
• A. Ghazimatin, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum, FAIRY: A Framework for Understanding Relationships between Users' Actions and their Social Feeds, WSDM '19. [Slides] [Poster] [Code] [Preprint] [Media]
• A. Abujabal, R. Saha Roy, M. Yahya, and G. Weikum, Never-Ending Learning for Open-Domain Question Answering over Knowledge Bases, WWW '18. [Slides] [Templates] [Tech@Bloomberg]
• A. Biega, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum, Privacy through Solidarity: A User-Utility-Preserving Framework to Counter Profiling, SIGIR '17. [Slides]
• R. Saha Roy, A. Padmakumar, G. P. Jeganathan and P. Kumaraguru, Automated Linguistic Personalization of Targeted Marketing Messages Mining User-generated Text on Social Media, CICLing '15. [BEST PAPER AWARD] [Slides] [Data]
• R. Saha Roy, R. Katare, N. Ganguly and M. Choudhury, Automatic Discovery of Adposition Typology, COLING '14. [Poster]
• R. Ramanath, M. Choudhury, K. Bali and R. Saha Roy, Crowd Prefers the Middle Path: A New IAA Metric for Crowdsourcing Reveals Turker Biases in Query Segmentation, ACL '13. [Slides] [Supplementary material] [Data]
• R. Saha Roy, N. Ganguly, M. Choudhury and S. Laxman, An IR-based Evaluation Framework for Web Search Query Segmentation, SIGIR '12. [Slides] [Data]
• R. Saha Roy, M. Choudhury and K. Bali, Are Web Search Queries an Evolving Protolanguage?, Evolang '12. [BEST POSTER AWARD] [Poster]

• R. Saha Roy, G. P. Jeganathan, A. Padmakumar, and P. Kumaraguru, Linguistic Personalization of Messages for Targeted Campaigns, USPTO Publication No. US20160171560A1, patent granted on 06 July 2021.
• B. V. Srinivasan, R. Saha Roy, N. Chhaya, N. Modani, and H. Jhamtani, Expanding Input Content Utilizing Previously-generated Content, USPTO Publication No. US20180060287A1, patent granted on 04 August 2020.
• R. Saha Roy, A. Singh, P. Chawla, S. Saxena and A. R. Sinha, Assigning of Topical Icons to Documents to Improve File Navigation, USPTO Publication No. US20170076151A1, patent granted on 17 July 2018.

• May 2019 - Present: Senior Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany
• November 2015 - April 2019: Post-doctoral Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany
• April 2014 - September 2015: Computer Scientist, Adobe Research, Bangalore, India
• October 2011 - January 2012: Research Intern, Microsoft Research, Bangalore, India
• May 2010 - July 2010: Research Intern, Microsoft Research, Bangalore, India

• December 2009 - March 2014: Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at IIT Kharagpur, India (Microsoft Research India PhD Fellow)
  Thesis: Unsupervised Approaches to Syntactic Analysis of Web Search Queries [pdf] [Slides] (Supervisors: Prof. Niloy Ganguly and Dr. Monojit Choudhury)
• July 2007 - July 2009: M.Tech. (Master of Technology, Information Technology) student in the Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering (ECE) at IIT Roorkee, India
  Thesis: Clustering Unstructured Text Documents Using Naïve Bayesian Concept and Shape Pattern Matching (Supervisor: Prof. Durga Toshniwal)
• July 2003 - June 2007: B.E. (Bachelor of Engineering, Information Technology) student in the Department of Information Technology (IT) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
  Thesis: Analysis and Enhancement of TCP Performance in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (Supervisor: Prof. Uttam Kumar Ray, Team members: Rishiraj Saha Roy, Mainak Ghosh and Prajit Kumar Das)
• April 1989 - June 2003: Schooling at Bhavan's Gangabux Kanoria Vidyamandir (BGKV, also known as Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan), Kolkata, India

• Outstanding Senior Program Committee Member at AAAI 2021
• Outstanding Reviewer at EMNLP 2020
• Best Paper Award at CICLing 2015
• Best Poster Award at Evolang 2012
• Microsoft Research India Ph.D. Fellowship (2011 - 2014)

• 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 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).

• Selected Topics in Question Answering, Computer Science, Saarland University: Winter Semester 2020/21 [Seminar course, 7 ECTS]
• Question Answering Systems, Computer Science, Saarland University: Summer Semester 2020 [Advanced Lecture, 6 ECTS]
• Information Retrieval and Data Mining, Computer Science, Saarland University: Winter Semester 2019/20 [Core Lecture, 9 ECTS] (with Andrew Yates)

• Philipp Christmann (2021 - Present)
• Magdalena Kaiser (2019 - Present)
• Azin Ghazimatin (2017 - 2021) [Currently at Spotify]

• Philipp Christmann (2020 - 2021)
• Khanh Hiep Tran (2020 - 2021)
• David Ziegler (2016 - 2017)
• Sedigheh Eslami (2016 - 2017)

• Philipp Christmann (2018 - 2019)
• Jana Schmidt (2017 - 2018)

• Résumé
• Curriculum vitae
• Google Scholar page
• DBLP page
• LinkedIn page
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• Taekwondo
• Hiking
• Word, logic, and math puzzles
• Table Tennis
• Philately
• Coin collection
• Reading
• Photography
• Quizzing
• Swimming