✨✨✨I am now on the faculty job market and looking for any academic positions in North America. I sincerely appreciate any help, guidance, and information!

I am a final-year Ph.D. student at the RALI Lab of Université de Montréal. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Jian-Yun Nie. I obtained my Master degree in Computer Science from Université de Montréal, Canada (08.2022) and Bachelor degree from Dalian University of Technology, China (07.2020).

I have broad interests in Conversational and Interactive AI, Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), Multilingualism, User Modeling, and AI for domain applications and social goods. My future research vision is to develop interactive AI systems that benefit diverse users with effective and efficient interaction between humans and AI assistants, enabling them to achieve their various goals.

My curriculum vitae is available here.

Honors and Awards

• Best Resource Paper Award, EMNLP 2024
• Best Paper Award Nomination, IEEE ICDM 2025
• Best Paper Award Nomination, ACM WWW 2023
• Canada Montréal Bourses AI Fellowship, 2022
• Canada MITACS Globalink Graduate Research Fellowship, 2021
• UdeM Doctoral End-of-Study Fellowship, 2025
• DIRO Bourses d’Excellence Merit Student Scholarship, 2021–2025
• OpenAI Research Program Grant, 2024

Professional Experience

Amazon Rufus Team, Applied Scientist Intern

Palo Alto, Bay Area, USA — Jun 2024 – Dec 2024
Project: Unifying Retrieval and Generation for LLMs in Conversations
Advisors: Meng Jiang, Yifan Gao

Tsinghua University, AIR, Visiting Student

Beijing, China — Mar 2022 – Jun 2022
Project: Learning to Relate to Previous Turns in Conversational Search
Co-Advisor: Yang Liu

Ant Group, Research Intern

Hangzhou, China — May 2021 – Oct 2021
Project: A Customized Text Sanitization Mechanism with Differential Privacy
Co-Advisor: Cen Chen

Dalhousie University & MITACS, Research Intern

Halifax, Canada — Jun 2019 – Sep 2019
Project: Interactive Hierarchical Clustering for Medical Domain
Advisor: Evangelos Milios

Selected Publications

I have published more than ten papers as first author and over thirty papers in collaboration in top-tier conferences and prestigious journals, including ACL, SIGIR, EMNLP, KDD, WWW, CIKM, WSDM, ICLR, IJCAI, IPM, and ACM TOIS, etc.

Full publication list could be found in my Google Scholar.

• Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng, Xin Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Kelong Mao, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang. UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Vienna, Austria, 2025. [pdf]

• Fengran Mo, Kelong Mao, Ziliang Zhao, Hongjin Qian, Haonan Chen, Yiruo Cheng, Xiaoxi Li, Yutao Zhu, Zhicheng Dou, Jian-Yun Nie. A Survey of Conversational Search. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 2025. [pdf]

• Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Zhuofeng Wu, Xin Liu, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Xian Li, Meng Jiang, Jian-Yun Nie. Leveraging Historical Information to Boost Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Conversations. Information Processing and Management (IPM) Journal, 2025.

• Fengran Mo, Yuchen Hui, Yuxing Tian, Zhaoxuan Tan, Chuan Meng, Zhan Su, Kaiyu Huang, Jian-Yun Nie. Adaptive Personalized Conversational Information Retrieval. Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Seoul, Korea, 2025. [pdf]

• Kaiyu Huang, Fengran Mo, Xinyu Zhang, Hongliang Li, You Li, Yuanchi Zhang, Weijian Yi, Yulong Mao, Jinchen Liu, Yuzhuang Xu, Jinan Xu, Jian-Yun Nie, Yang Liu. A Survey on Large Language Models with Multilingualism: Recent Advances and New Frontiers. 2025. [pdf]

• Fengran Mo, Abbas Ghaddar, Kelong Mao, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Boxing Chen, Qun Liu, Jian-Yun Nie. CHIQ: Contextual History Enhancement for Improving Query Rewriting in Conversational Search. Proceedings of the 29th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Miami, USA, 2024. [pdf]

• Fengran Mo, Chen Qu, Kelong Mao, Yihong Wu, Zhan Su, Kaiyu Huang, Jian-Yun Nie. Aligning Query Representation with Rewritten Query and Relevance Judgments in Conversational Search. Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Boise, USA, 2024. [pdf]

• Fengran Mo, Longxiang Zhao, Kaiyu Huang, Yue Dong, Degen Huang, Jian-Yun Nie. How to Leverage Personal Textual Knowledge for Personalized Conversational Information Retrieval. Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Boise, USA, 2024. [pdf]

• Fengran Mo, Chen Qu, Kelong Mao, Tianyu Zhu, Zhan Su, Kaiyu Huang, Jian-Yun Nie. History-Aware Conversational Dense Retrieval. Findings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Bangkok, Thailand, 2024. [pdf]

• Fengran Mo, Jian-Yun Nie, Kaiyu Huang, Kelong Mao, Yutao Zhu, Peng Li, Yang Liu. Learning to Relate to Previous Turns in Conversational Search. Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2023. [pdf]

• Fengran Mo, Kelong Mao, Yutao Zhu, Yihong Wu, Kaiyu Huang, Jian-Yun Nie. ConvGQR: Generative Query Reformulation for Conversational Search. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Toronto, Canada, 2023. [pdf]

Academic Service

Tutorial / Workshop Organizer

• First Leading Organizer & Speaker, Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the LLM Era, Tutorial at SIGIR 2025, Padova, Italy.
• First Leading Organizer, Multilinguality in the Era of Large Language Models (MeLLMs), Workshop at ACL 2026, San Diego, USA.

Senior Program Committee / Meta Reviewer

• Area Chair, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Rolling Review (ARR) — including ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, and AACL (2024–2025).

Program Committee Member / Reviewer

• ACM SIG Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2025
• ACM SIG Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2024
• ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2023–2025
• ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), 2023–2025
• ACM International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2024, 2026
• International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
• International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2024
• International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2025
• European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), 2024–2026
• ACM SIG Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region (SIGIR-AP), 2025

Journal Reviewer

• ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
• ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)
• ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
• Information Processing and Management (IPM), Elsevier
• IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems (THMS)

Invited Talks

• Paradigms of Information Retrieval in the era of LLM, hosted by Microsoft Research India, 2025.10
• Optimizing Retrieval and Answer Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations, hosted by Prof. Yi Zhang at UC Santa Scuz, 2025.10
• Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations, hosted by The FinAI, 2025.08
• Integrating Large Language Model in Conversational Search, hosted by MILA-IVADO, 2025.03
• Recent Advances and New Frontiers of Conversational Search, hosted by Prof. Yi Fang at Santa Clara University, 2024.10