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Prof. Dr.-Ing. Laura Dietz

Table of Contents

Bio

I am a tenured associate professor at the department of Computer Science at UNH with a focus on LLM-as-a-Judge (what works, what fails), Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG), information retrieval, knowledge graphs and LLMs.

I am head of the lab for Text-based Retrieval, Evaluation, Machine-Learning and Analytics (TREMA).

Previously I was in at the Data and Web Science Group of Mannheim University, the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) working with Bruce Croft at University of Massachusetts. I obtained a PhD from Max Planck Insititute for Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany in January 2011.

What am I thinking about?

Teaching

See teaching page for more information about my courses offered at UNH

CS 753/853 Topics/Information Retrieval

Fall Semester (every odd year, e.g. 2019):– the course was listed as CS 780/880 in Fall 2016.

CS 752/852 Topics/Foundations of Neural Networks

Fall Semester (every even year, e.g. 2020): – the course was listed as CS 780/880 “Machine Learning for Sequences” in Fall 2020.

CS 953 Adv Top/Data Science for Knowledge Graphs and Text

Spring Semester (annually): (implementation-intensive) – the course was listed as CS 980.02 in Spring 2017.

CS 758/858 Algorithms

Spring Semester (annually): (theory-intensive) – the course will be taught in Fall semesters by a different instructor.

I also offer thesis/projects.

Anyone can attend my lab meetings.

I also taught several lectures on natural language processing and knowledge graphs for information retrieval at conference tutorials and summer schools.

Research and Publications

Grants

Publications

See the list of my recent research publications annotated with conference ratings and links to fulltext publications in PDF.

Link to my google scholar profile.

Research Interests

My research, mentoring, and teaching, and external service activities evolve around the following areas of interest.

IR+NLP.

Information Retrieval, Knowledge Graphs, and Natural Language processing. This area is related to my CAREER grant, TREC CAR competition, and the vision to automatically creating Wikipedia-like comprehensive articles for given topics.

Watershed Data Science.

Environmental data science for temporal sensor streams, in order to offer a better understanding of solute transport in watersheds for hydrologists and biogeochemists.

Please see research project page for details.

Students

Recently Graduated Students

Current PhD Students

Current Masters / Honors / Undergrad Research Students

Industry Collaboration

The TREMA lab works with companies deploying GenAI, RAG, search, agents, especially where evaluation has to be trustworthy. The first consultation is free, and lab memberships through the UNH Foundation open up unique opportunities to work with us. See how to collaborate for details.

Service to the Research Community

Lead Coordinator of TREC Auto-Judge

I am the lead coordinator of the TREC Auto-Judge track, an open challenge to find out who has the best LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm? What are their failure modes? What is their drift as new AI/Agent-enabled IR/RAG systems are being developed?

Co-Organizer of VulGen’26 Workshop at ACM SIGIR 2026

I am a co-organizer of the nternational Workshop on Vulnerabilities in Generative Systems for Information Retrieval (VulGen’26).

Secretary to the SIGIR Executive Committee

From July 2022 until July 2025 I serves as the Secretary to the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR).

Steering Committee of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub

I am serving on the Steering Committee of the NEHub, formerly known as NSF Hubs and Spokes initiative.

Organized Mini-Conferences

HIPstIR

The vision of HIPstIR is that early stage information retrieval (IR) researchers get togetherto develop a future for non-mainstream ideas and research agendas inIR. Important priorresearch can be discussed in the form of reading groups. A future vision of what IR can (orshould) be—and how to get there—must be developed. It is like SWIRL (Moffat et al., 2005,Allan et al., 2012, Culpepper et al., 2018) in spirit but focusing ontopics that may otherwisebe considered “niche”, “alternative”, “indie”, or “left field”. An explicit goal of this workshop isto foment collaboration and cross-group fertilization. The hopeis that participation will giverise to conference workshop topics and joint paper projects. Primaryfocus is on early stageresearchers that are anywhere between defending their PhD within one year to one year intobeing a tenured professor or a senior scientist, but few senior people may also be invited

We hope more folks will branch off and organize HIPstIR’s all over the place. HIPstIR is public domain / CC0.

Women in IR

See Women in IR activities.

Organized Shared Tasks

Laura Dietz, Ben Gamari, Jeff Dalton, Manisha Verma, Prasenjit Mitra, Nick Craswell. TREC Complex Answer Retrieval at the Text REtrieval Conference. 2016–2018. - www - dataset - Mailinglist - TREC homepage

TREC CAR concluded in 2019. Thanks to all the participants! – Dear Reviewers: Please keep on mind that TREC CAR offered multiple tasks whose numbers are not comparable.

Organized Workshops, Keynotes, and Tutorials

Keynotes

Summer School lectures

Tutorials

Workshops

Invited Talks

Please see list of invited talks page.

Recent Positions

Since August 2016: Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in the Computer Science Department at University of New Hampshire. Head of the TREMA lab.

March 2015 - August 2016: Post-doctoral Research Scientist at Data and Web Science Group (DWS), Mannheim University (DWS, Simone Paolo Ponzetto)

August 2012 - March 2015: Research Scientist at Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), University of Massachusetts (CIIR, Bruce Croft)

October 2010 - August 2012: Post-doctoral researcher at University of Massachusetts (IESL, Andrew McCallum).

January 2008 - January 2011: PhD Student at Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics (Databases and Information Systems, Prof Gerhard Weikum), Saarbruecken

January 2007 - December 2008: PhD Student at Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics (Machine Learning, Prof. Tobias Scheffer), Saarbruecken

October 2006 - December 2006: PhD Scholarship at Knowledge Management Group (Prof. Tobias Scheffer), Humboldt University, Berlin

December 2002 - September 2006: Research Associate at Concert Division and I-Info Division, Fraunhofer Institute for Publication and Information Systems (IPSI), Darmstadt

Open Source Releases

Hobbies