Webis Group

Research group working the fields of Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.

[Webis Group @webis_de]

For full technical details + compliance Datasheet see our preprint @ https://t.co/rLPIMCNhqW

As for German-specific models trained on this data... stay tuned 👀

[Webis Group @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. https://t.co/FWmDdd4p2j

[Webis Group @webis_de]

The data spans 7 text domains:
🌐 Web: Wikis, GitHub, social media
💬 Political: Parliamentary proc., speeches
⚖️ Legal: Court decisions, law
📰 News: Newspaper archives
🏦 Economics: Public tenders
📚 Cultural: Heritage collections
🔬 Scientific: Papers, books, journals

[Webis Group @webis_de]

@H1iReimer @maik_froebe @martinpotthast @matthias_hagen @bennostein Congratulations to the authors @H1iReimer, @maik_froebe, @bennostein, @martinpotthast, @matthias_hagen from @UniJena, @bauhaus_uni, @uni_kassel, @Hessian_AI, @Sca_DS!

[Webis Group @webis_de]

Come join us at the poster session at ICTIR 2025 to discuss:
- Axioms for Retrieval-Augmented Generation https://t.co/eDmCHt07fc
- Learning Effective Representations for Retrieval Using Self-Distillation with Adaptive Relevance Margins https://t.co/8gt8EAUpBQ

[Webis Group @webis_de]

Honored to win the ICTIR Best Paper Honorable Mention Award for "Axioms for Retrieval-Augmented Generation"!
Our new axioms are integrated with ir_axioms: https://t.co/T6i9S324Fh
Nice to see axiomatic IR gaining momentum.

[Webis Group @webis_de]

Thrilled to announce that @MattiWiegmann has successfully defended his PhD! 🎉🧑‍🎓 Huge congratulations on this incredible achievement!
#PhDDefense #AcademicMilestone

[Webis Group @webis_de]

Congrats to the authors @LukasGienapp,
Tim Hagen, @maik_froebe, @matthias_hagen
@bennostein, @martinpotthast and @hscells
– from @uni_kassel, @Hessian_AI, @Sca_DS, @uni_tue, @UniJena & @bauhaus_uni

[Webis Group @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.

📄 https://t.co/kG75fYl17H

[Webis Group @webis_de]

@LukasGienapp presents "The Viability of Crowdsourcing for RAG Evaluation" at #SIGIR2025

The paper is available at: https://t.co/kG75fYl17H

[Maik Fröbe @maik_froebe]

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: https://t.co/VKM5P4ELcT

[Webis Group @webis_de]

Credit & thanks to the author team @LukasGienapp @DeckersNiklas @martinpotthast @hscells

📄 Preprint: https://t.co/lSyd3jzivz
💻 Code: https://t.co/GWnzyoglon

[Webis Group @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.

[Webis Group @webis_de]

Results on BEIR demonstrate that our method matches teacher distillation effectiveness, while using only 13.5% of the data and achieving 3-15x training speedup. This makes effective bi-encoder training more accessible, especially for low-resource settings.

[Ferdinand Schlatt @fschlatt1]

@maik_froebe @hscells @ShengyaoZhuang @bevan_koopman @guidozuc @bennostein @martinpotthast @matthias_hagen Short: Rank-DistiLLM: Closing the Effectiveness Gap Between Cross-Encoders and LLMs for Passage Re-ranking https://t.co/DkBWXYczJn

Full: Set-Encoder: Permutation-Invariant Inter-Passage Attention for Listwise Passage Re-Ranking with Cross-Encoders https://t.co/Zm8CpQ2ASR

[Ferdinand Schlatt @fschlatt1]

What an honor to receive both the best short paper award and the best paper honourable mention award at #ECIR2025. Thank you to all the co-authors @maik_froebe @hscells @ShengyaoZhuang @bevan_koopman @guidozuc @bennostein @martinpotthast @matthias_hagen 🥳

[Lorella Viola @ViolaLorella]

#ECIR2025 crowd day#2 😍
Cultural #LunchBreak

#Campanile
#sanfrediano
#lucca