Webis Group
LightNews LightNews
banner
webis.de
Webis Group
@webis.de
640 followers 700 following 270 posts
Information is nothing without retrieval

The Webis Group contributes to information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, and symbolic AI.
Posts Replies Media Videos
webis.de
We just released "German Commons", the largest openly-licensed German text dataset for LLM training: 154B tokens with clear usage rights for research and commercial use.

huggingface.co/datasets/coral-nlp/german-commons
coral-nlp/german-commons · Datasets at Hugging Face
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
huggingface.co
October 27, 2025 at 12:45 PM
webis.de
We presented two papers at ICTIR 2025 today:
- Axioms for Retrieval-Augmented Generation webis.de/publications...
- Learning Effective Representations for Retrieval Using Self-Distillation with Adaptive Relevance Margins webis.de/publications...
July 18, 2025 at 2:18 PM
webis.de
Thrilled to announce that Matti Wiegmann has successfully defended his PhD! 🎉🧑‍🎓 Huge congratulations on this incredible achievement! #PhDDefense #AcademicMilestone
July 18, 2025 at 11:44 AM
webis.de
Happy to share that our paper "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" received the Best Paper Honourable Mention at #SIGIR2025! Very grateful to the community for recognizing our work on improving RAG evaluation.

 📄 webis.de/publications...
July 16, 2025 at 9:04 PM
Reposted by Webis Group
maik-froebe.bsky.social
Do not forget to participate in the #TREC2025 Tip-of-the-Tongue (ToT) Track :)

The corpus and baselines (with run files) are now available and easily accessible via the ir_datasets API and the HuggingFace Datasets API.

More details are available at: trec-tot.github.io/guidelines
Dory from finding nemo with the quote: "I remember it like it was yesterday. Of course, I dont remember yesterday."
June 27, 2025 at 2:46 PM
webis.de
Our paper on self-distillation for training bi-encoders got accepted at #ICTIR2025! By exploiting pretrained encoder capabilities, our approach eliminates expensive teacher models and batch sampling while maintaining the same effectiveness.
June 22, 2025 at 12:33 PM
webis.de
Our paper titled “The Two Paradigms of LLM Detection: Authorship Attribution vs. Authorship Verification” has been accepted to #ACL2025 (Findings). downloads.webis.de/publications...

We discuss why LLM detection is a one-class problem and how that affects the prospective… 1/3 #ACL #NLP #ARR #LLM
The first page of our paper "The Two Paradigms of LLM Detection: Authorship Attribution vs. Authorship Verification" Figure 1 (showing entropy curves for LLM texts by model on the PAN'24, RAID, and M4 datasets): Mean character 3-gram entropy over increasing text length with 95 % confidence intervals. Shown are texts from the (a) PAN’24, (b) RAID, and (c) M4 datasets. Curves diverge after around 2,500–4,000 characters. LLM entropy is consistently lower than human entropy, except for GPT-4o, OpenAI o1, and BLOOMz-176b. Figure 3 (showing unmasking curves for top 250 and top 500 features for Llama2-70b, GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, OpenAI o1): Median authorship unmasking curves using the 250 (top row) or 500 (bottom row) most-frequent character 3-grams for 200 Human / Human (same in all graphs), LLM / LLM, and Human / LLM text pairs for selected models drawn from the extended PAN’24 dataset. The shaded areas indicate the 50 % IQR. Llama2 and GPT-3.5 are very inconsistent by being unnaturally discriminable in the top 250 alone and yet very self-similar in the top 500 3-grams. GPT-4o and, particularly, OpenAI o1 are more consistent by being more similar to themselves in both feature sets than the median of human text pairs and about as dissimilar to human texts as other human texts would be.
June 2, 2025 at 7:38 AM
Reposted by Webis Group
webis.de
PAN 2025 Call for Participation: Shared Tasks on Authorship Analysis, Computational Ethics, and Originality

We'd like to invite you to participate in the following shared tasks at PAN 2025 held in conjunction with the CLEF conference in Madrid, Spain.

Find out more at pan.webis.de/clef25/pan25...
pan.webis.de
March 5, 2025 at 1:14 PM
webis.de
Can LLM-generated ads be blocked? With OpenAI adding shopping options to ChatGPT, this question gains further importance.
If you are interested in contributing to the research on LLM-based advertising, please check out our shared task: touche.webis.de/clef25/touch...

More details below.
April 30, 2025 at 11:17 AM
webis.de
📢 Our paper "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" has been accepted to #SIGIR2025 !
We compared how good humans and LLMs are at writing and judging RAG responses, assembling 1800+ responses across 3 styles, and 47K+ pairwise judgments in 7 quality dimensions. 🧵➡️
April 7, 2025 at 3:34 PM
webis.de
PAN 2025 Call for Participation: Shared Tasks on Authorship Analysis, Computational Ethics, and Originality

We'd like to invite you to participate in the following shared tasks at PAN 2025 held in conjunction with the CLEF conference in Madrid, Spain.

Find out more at pan.webis.de/clef25/pan25...
pan.webis.de
March 5, 2025 at 1:14 PM
webis.de
Interested in joining our research group or do you know someone who might be interested?
We have a new vacancy: Research position at the Webis group on Watermarking for Large Language Models.
More information:
webis.de/for-students...
February 17, 2025 at 8:55 AM
webis.de
2nd International Workshop on Open Web Search: CfP

We invite you to the #ECIR2025 Workshop on Open Web Search #wows2025. Please consider to submit to the scientific track or the WOWS-Eval shared task to enrich the Open Web Index with relevance judgments.

Details: opensearchfoundation.org/wows2025
1st International Workshop on Open Web Search #wows2024 - 28 March 2024
Discuss ideas and approaches to open up the web search ecosystem!
opensearchfoundation.org
January 8, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Reposted by Webis Group
martin-potthast.com
Time for a starter pack on information retrieval: go.bsky.app/MXPJoTn
November 14, 2024 at 8:57 PM
webis.de
Today we will present our poster on Query Variation Robustness of Transformer Models at #EMNLP2024. You can find us at the Information Retrieval and Text Mining 3 poster session at #EMNLP2024.
November 13, 2024 at 5:19 PM
webis.de
Below you can see our past tweets, just imported from “the darkened X”.

Above, we see nothing but Bluesky.
Cloud in a blue sky. Image source: Wikimedia.
November 8, 2024 at 7:47 PM
webis.de
Goodbye Washington! We had a fantastic week with interesting talks, discussions, and new ideas at #SIGIR24 #SIGIR2024. We hope to see you all again next year in Italy :) https://x.com/webis_de/status/1815115279510208625/photo/1
November 8, 2024 at 7:25 PM
webis.de
The paper can be found on our homepage (https://webis.de/publications.html#schmidt_2024) and the dataset is on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/10802427
November 8, 2024 at 7:25 PM
webis.de
In our experiments, LLMs struggle with the task in a zero-shot setting, especially due to low precision values. Sentence transformers, however, can be finetuned to successfully detect the inserted ads and achieve precision and recall values of above 0.9 for unseen meta topics. https://t.co/VuuaW...
November 8, 2024 at 7:25 PM
webis.de
The Webis Generated Native Ads 2024 is the first public dataset to evaluate models on the task of detecting ads in responses of conversational search engines.
It was created by simulating an advertising service for queries from popular meta topics (product/service categories). https://t.co/pjHr...
November 8, 2024 at 7:25 PM
webis.de
What if conversational search will be financed by inserting ads directly into generated responses? We present our work on detecting these generated native ads at #TheWebConf24.
Come visit us at the short paper poster session on Thursday in the Central Ballroom. https://t.co/NRKbal57WO
November 8, 2024 at 7:25 PM
webis.de
Right now, we will start the second half of the SCAI'24 workshop at #CHIIR2024 in hybrid mode. We will move from the big ideas and human-centered metrics to the challenges of human-in-the-loop evaluations. https://x.com/webis_de/status/1768277930768015536/photo/1
November 8, 2024 at 7:25 PM
webis.de
Here's a study we did together with social scientists Arno Simons and Marion Schmidt on who Wikipedia editors consider notable enough to be mentioned in the history section of the CRISPR article. An awesome collaboration! https://twitter.com/WikiResearch/status/1766894251588325491
November 8, 2024 at 7:25 PM
webis.de
How will conversational search AI pay for itself?
It may be native ads or product placement in generated answers. At #CHIIR2024 next week, we'll present a user study showing that many people don't recognize ads inserted by LLMs in generated search results: https://t.co/hrZE9moeKy https://t.co/qg...
November 8, 2024 at 7:25 PM
webis.de
Working in Argumentation? Time to participate in Touché 2024!

Three shared tasks:
- Human Value Detection
- Ideology and Power Identification in Parliamentary Debates
- Image Retrieval/Generation for Arguments

Submission deadline is May 6th!
More info: https://t.co/rtgSDxpDTx https://t.co/S6Kl...
November 8, 2024 at 7:24 PM