CIIR doctoral student Chen Qu was selected to receive one of the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Outstanding Graduate Awards for the 2019-2020 academic year.
Chen Qu and Zezhou Cheng received the Outstanding Synthesis Project awards for interdisciplinary research projects. CICS synthesis projects are significant research projects that combine at least two different research areas and involve an intellectual stretch to bring them together. Qu won for his project, “Conversation History Understanding in Conversational Question Answering.” As his doctoral advisor Bruce Croft, distinguished professor emeritus and CIIR director said, “Chen did an outstanding job developing and testing models for conversational question answering. He compared his approach to state-of-the-art baselines and published papers on the basis of the research.” More on the awards.