Publications

You can find a full list of my publications and patents in my Google Scholar profile.

2020-todate
  1. The LiveRAG Challenge at SIGIR 2025, David Carmel, Simone Filice, Guy Horowitz, Yoelle Maarek, Oren Somekh, and Ran Tavory. In Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’25), July 13–18, 2025, Padua, Italy. To appear.
  2. On the Relationship between Retrieval and Generation Quality in RAG-based Question Answering, David Carmel, Simone Filice, Guy Horowitz, Zohar Karnin, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek and Ran Tavory. SIGIR'2025 IR-RAG Workshop, July 17, 2025, Padua, Italy. To appear.
  3. Do RAG Systems Suffer From Positional Bias? Florin Cuconasu, Simone Filice, Guy Horowitz, Yoelle Maarek and Fabrizio Silvestri. arXiv preprint, May 2024.
  4. Generating Diverse Q&A Benchmarks for RAG Evaluation with DataMorgana, Simone Filice, Guy Horowitz, David Carmel, Zohar Karnin, Liane Lewin-Eytan and Yoelle Maarek. LLM4Eval Workshop at WSDM'25, March 2025, Hannover, Germany.
  5. The Power of Noise: Redefining Retrieval for RAG Systems, Florin Cuconasu, Giovanni Trappolini, Federico Siciliano, Simone Filice, Cesare Campagnano, Yoelle Maarek, Nocola Tonellotto, and Fabrizio Silvestri. Proceedings of SIGIR'24, July 2024, Washington DC, USA.
  6. Old IR meets RAG, Oz Huly, Idan Pogrebunsky, David Carmel, Oren Kurland and Yoelle Maarek. Short Paper in Proceedings of SIGIR'24, July 2024, Washington DC, USA.
  7. Extended conversion: Capturing successful interactions in voice shopping, Elad Haramaty, Zohar Karnin, Arnon Lazerson, Liane Lewin-Eytan and Yoelle Maarek. RecSys’2023, Sept 2023, Singapore.
  8. Alexa, let's work together! How Alexa Helps Customers Complete Tasks with Verbal and Visual Guidance in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, Yoelle Maarek. Keynote address in MM'22: Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Lisboa Portugal October 2022
  9. Alexa, let's work together: Introducing the first alexa prize taskbot challenge on conversational task assistance Anna Gottardi, Osman Ipek, Giuseppe Castellucci, Shui Hu, Lavina Vaz, Yao Lu, Anju Khatri, Anjali Chadha, Desheng Zhang, Sattvik Sahai, Prerna Dwivedi, Hangjie Shi, Lucy Hu, Andy Huang, Luke Dai, Bofei Yang, Varun Somani, Pankaj Rajan, Ron Rezac, Michael Johnston, Savanna Stiff, Leslie Ball, David Carmel, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Oleg Rokhlenko, Kate Bland, Eugene Agichtein, Reza Ghanadan and Yoelle Maarek. Proceedings of Alexa Prize Taskbot (Alexa Prize 2021). September 2022
  10. Alexa, Do You Want to Build a Snowman? Characterizing Playful Requests to Conversational Agents, Chen Shani, Alexander Libov, Sofia Tolmach, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek and Dafna Shahaf. In Proceedings of CHI EA ‘22, April 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA.
  11. Why Do People Buy Seemingly Irrelevant Items in Voice Product Search? David Carmel, Elad Haramaty, Arnon Lazerson, Liane Lewin-Eytan and Yoelle Maarek. In Proceedings of WSDM’2020, Houston, TX, Jan 2020
2010-2019
  1. Alexa, Can You Help Me Shop? Yoelle Maarek. Invited talk in Industry Track.  In Proceedings of SIGIR'2019, July 2019, Paris, France
  2. Alexa and her Shopping Journey, Keynote Address, Yoelle Maarek. In Proceedings of CIKM’2018, Turin, Italy, October 2018.
  3. Offline vs. online evaluation in voice product search,, Amir Ingber, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Alexander Libov, Yoelle Maarek and Eliyahu Osherovich. In Proc. 1st International Workshop on Generalization in Information Retrieval (GLARE 2018),Turin, Italy, October 2018.
  4. Leveraging Crowdsourcing Data For Deep Active Learning An Application: Learning Intents in Alexa, Jie Yang, Thomas Drake, Andreas Damianou and Yoelle Maarek. In Proceedings of The Web Conference (formerly WWW) 2018, Lyon, France, April 2018.
  5. Mail Search: It’s Getting Personal, Yoelle Maarek. Keynote Address. In Proceedings of SIGIR'2017, Tokyo, Japan, August 2017.
  6. Mailbox-Based vs. Log-Based Query Completion for Mail Search, Michal Horovitz, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Alexander Libov, Yoelle Maarek and Ariel Ravi. In Proceedings of SIGIR'2017, (short paper), Tokyo, Japan, August 2017.
  7. Web Mail is Not Dead: It’s Just Not Human Anymore! Yoelle Maarek. Keynote address at WWW'2017, Perth, Australia, April 2017.
  8. Promoting Relevant Results in Time-Ranked Mail Search, David Carmel, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Alex Libov, Yoelle Maarek and Ariel Raviv. In Proceedings of WWW 2017, Perth, Australia, April 2017.
  9. The Demographics of Mail Search and their Application to Query Suggestion, David Carmel, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Alex Libov, Yoelle Maarek and Ariel Raviv. In Proceedings of WWW 2017, Perth, Australia, April 2017.
  10. Structural Clustering of Machine-Generated Mail, Noa Avigdor-Elgrabli, Mark Cwalinski, Dotan Di Castro, Iftah Gamzu, Irena Grabovitch-Zuyev, Liane Lewin-Eytan and Yoelle Maarek. In Proceedings of CIKM'2016, Indianapolis, IN, Oct 2016.
  11. One Query, Many Clicks: Analysis of Queries with Multiple Clicks by the Same User, Elad Kravi, Ido Guy, Avihai Mejer, David Carmel, Yoelle Maarek, Dan Pelleg and Gilad Tsur. In Proceedings of CIKM'2016, Indianapolis, IN, Oct 2016.
  12. Enforcing k-anonymity in Web mail auditing, Dotan Di Castro, Liane Lewin Eytan, Yoelle Maarek, Ran Wolff and Eyal Zohar. In Proceedings of WSDM'2016, San Francisco, CA, Feb 2016. 
  13. You’ve got mail, and here is what you could do with it! Analyzing and predicting actions on email messages. Dotan Di Castro, Liane Lewin Eytan, Yoelle Maarek and Zohar Karnin. In Proceedings of WSDM'2016, San Francisco, CA, Feb 2016. 
  14. Rank by time of by relevance? Revisiting Email Search, David Carmel, Guy Halawi, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek and Ariel Raviv. In Proceedings of CIKM'2015, Melbourne Australia, Oct 2015.
  15. You Will Get Mail! Predicting the Arrival of Future Email, Iftah Gamzu, Zohar Shay Karnin, Yoelle Maarek and David Wajc,. TempWeb 2015, In Proceedings of WWW’2015 Companion volume, Florence Italy, May 2015.
  16. How many folders do you really need? Classifying email into a handful of categories, Mihajlo Grbovic, Guy Halawi, Zohar Karnin and Yoelle Maarek.  In Proceedings of CIKM’2014, Shanghai, China, Nov 2014. 
  17. Will my Question be Answered? Predicting “Question Answerability” in Community Question-Answering Sites, Gideon Dror, Yoelle Maarek and Idan Szpektor. In Proceedings of ECML/PKDD 2013, Prague, Sept 2013.
  18. From Query to Question in One Click: Suggesting Synthetic Questions to Searchers, Gideon Dror, Yoelle Maarek, Avihai Mejer and Idan Szpektor.  In Proceedings of WWW’2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2013.
  19. When Relevance is not Enough: Promoting Diversity and Freshness in Personalized Question Recommendation, Idan Szpektor, Yoelle Maarek and Dan Pelleg. In Proceedings of WWW’2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2013.
  20. Threading Machine Generated Email, Nir Ailon, Zohar S. Karnin, Edo Liberty and Yoelle Maarek. In Proceedings of WSDM’2013, Rome, Italy, Feb 2013.
  21. Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining. Eytan Adar, Jaime Teevan, Eugene Agichtein, Yoelle Maarek eds., Seattle, WA, February 2012.
  22. Can you believe an anonymous contributor? On truthfulness in Yahoo! Answers, Dan Pelleg, Elad Yom-Tov and Yoelle Maarek. In Proceedings of SocialCom’2012, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Sep 2012.
  23. When Web Search Fails, Searchers Become Askers: Understanding the Transition, Qiaoling Liu, Eugene Agichtein,Gideon Dror, Yoelle Maarek and Idan Szpektor. In Proceedings of SIGIR’2012, Portland, OR, Aug 2012. 
  24. Learning from the past: answering new questions with past answers, Anna Shtok, Gideon Dror, Yoelle Maarek and  Idan Szpektor. In Proceedings of WWW’2012, Lyon, France, April 2012.
  25. The new frontier of Web Search Technology: Seven challenges, R. Baeza-Yates, A. Broder and Y. Maarek. In Search and Computing, Trends and Development, S. Ceri and M. Brambilla (eds). LNCS 6585, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2011.
  26. Web Retrieval chapter, R. Baeza-Yates and Y. Maarek. In  ”Modern Information Retrieval, 2nd edition”, Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto eds., Addison-Wesley, February 2011. Chapter can be downloaded from the book site.
  27. Automatically Tagging Email by Leveraging Other Users’ Folders, Yehuda Koren, Edo Liberty, Yoelle Maarek and Roman Sandler. In Proceedings of KDD’2011, San-Diego, CA, Aug 2011.
  28. I Want to Answer, Who Has a Question? Yahoo! Answers Recommender System, Gideon Dror, Yehuda Koren, Yoelle Maarek, Idan Szpektor.  In Proceedings of KDD’2011, San-Diego, CA, Aug 2011.
  29. Predicting Web Searcher Satisfaction with Existing Community-based Answers, Q. Liu, E. Agichtein, G. Dror, E. Gabrilovich, Y. Maarek, D. Pelleg and I. Szpektor. In Proceedings of SIGIR’2011, Beijing, China, July 2011.
  30. The new frontier of Web Search Technology: Seven challenges, R. Baeza-Yates, A. Broder and Y. Maarek. In Search and Computing, Trends and Development, S. Ceri and M. Brambilla (eds). LNCS 6585, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2011.
  31. Web Retrieval, R. Baeza-Yates and Y. Maarek. In Modern Information Retrieval, 2nd edition, Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto eds., Addison-Wesley, February 2011. Chapter can be downloaded from the book site
  32. Improving recommendation for long-tail queries via templates, I. Szpektor, A. Gionis and Y. Maarek. In Proceedings of WWW’2011, Hyderabad, India, April 2011.
  33. Xeena for schema: creating XML documents with a coordinated grammar tree, M. Sifer, F. Dau, H. Hasan, K. Crawford, Y.Peres and Y. Maarek. Int. J. Computational Science and Engineering, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp.127–146, 2010.
  34. Do you want to take notes?: identifying research missions in Yahoo! Search Pad, D. Donato, F. Bonchi, T. Chi and Y. Maarek,In Proceedings of WWW’2010, Raleigh, NC, USA, May 2010 - Featured paper.
2000-2009
  1. Proceedings of the WWW’2009 Conference, G. León, Y. Maarek, W. Nejdl and J. Quemada  eds. Madrid, Spain, April 2009.
  2. Cluster Ranking with an Application to Mining Mailbox Networks, Z. Bar-Yossef, I. Guy, R. Lempel, Y.S. Maarek, and V. Soroka. Knowledge and Information Systems, Vol 15, Issue 1, December 2007. A previous version appeared at ICDM 2006 and received an Honorable mention for best application paper award.
  3. IBM Research Activities at TREC. E. Brown, D. Carmel, M. Franz, A. Ittycheriah, T. Kanungo, Y. Maarek, J. Scott McCarley, R. Mack, J. Prager, J. Smith, A. Soffer and J.  Zien. In TREC Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval. Ellen M. Voorhees and Donna K. Harman editors, MIT Press, 2006.
  4. Let me know what you know, V. Soroka, M. Jacovi and Y. Maarek. In “Peer-to-peer computing: The evolution of a disruptive technology”, R. Subramanian and B. Goodman eds., 2005.
  5. Currents Trends in the Integration of Searching and Browsing, A. Broder, Y. Maarek, K. Bharat, S. Dumais, S. Papa, J. Pedersen and P. Raghavan, . In Industry track at WWW’2005, Chiba, Japan, May 2005.  
  6. Extending the XML Fragment Model to Support Querying over Annotated text, A. Broder, Y.S. Maarek, Y. Mass and M. Mandelbrod. Third Edition of XML and IR Workshop, SIGIR 2004,  Sheffield, UK, July 2004. 
  7. Using XML to Query XML, A. Broder, Y. Maarek, M. Mandelbrod and Y. Mass. RIAO’04, Avignon, France, April 2004. 
  8. Third Edition of the XML and IR Workshop/First Workshop on Integration of IR and DB, R. Baeza-Yates, Y. S. Maarek, T. Roelleke and A.P. de Vries. In SIGIR Forum, Volume 38, Number 2, Dec 2004.
  9. Leveraging Web Services for Information Discovery, D. Cohen, M. Jacovi, M. Herscovici, Y.S. Maarek, N. Meshulam, A. Soffer and V. Soroka, SwSTE’03, Herzliya, Israel, Dec 2003. Best paper award. 
  10. Browsing and Editing XML Schema Documents with an Interactive Editor, M.  Sifer, Y. Peres and Y. Maarek. DNIS’03, Aizu, Japan, Sept 2003. 
  11. Searching XML Documents via XML Fragments, D. Carmel, Y. S. Maarek, M. Mandelbrod, Y. Mass and A. Soffer. SIGIR’03, Toronto, Canada, Aug 2003. 
  12. JuruXML and XML Retrieval System at INEX, Y. Mass, M. Mandelbrod, E. Amitay, D. Carmel, Y. Maarek and A. Soffer. INEX'03, Dagstuhl, Germany, Dec 2003. 
  13. Xeena for Schema: creating XML data with an interactive editor, M. Sifer, Y. Peres and Y. Maarek. DNIS’02, Aizu, Japan, Dec 2002. 
  14. Second Edition of the XML and IR Workshop, R. Baeza-Yates, N. Fuhr and Y. Maarek. in SIGIR Forum, Volume 36, Number 2, Fall 2002.
  15. An Extension of the Vector Space Model for Querying XML Documents via XML Fragments, D. Carmel, N. Efraty, G. Landau, Y. Maarek and Y. Mass. SIGIR’2002 Workshop on XML and IR, Aug 2002, Tampere, Finland. 
  16. Personalized Pocket Directories for Mobile Devices, D. Cohen, M. Herscovici, Y.S. Maarek, Y. Petruschka and A. Soffer. WWW2002, Honolulu, HI, May 2002. 
  17. A Novel Navigation Paradigm for XML Repositories, A. Azagury, M. Factor, Y.S. Maarek and B. Mander. JASIST Special Issue on XML and IR, 53:6, 2002.
  18. Knowledge Encapsulation for Focused Search on Pervasive Devices, Y. Aridor, D. Carmel, R. Lempel, Y. S. Maarek and A. Soffer. In ACM Transaction on Information Systems, 20:1, Jan 2002,
  19. A grammar view for editing structured documents, M. Sifer, Y. Peres and Y. Maarek. VIP 2001, Sydney, December 5, 2001. 
  20. Juru at TREC 10 - Experiments with Index Pruning, D. Carmel, E. Amitay, M. Herscovici, Y. Maarek, Y. Petruschka and A. Soffer. NIST TREC 10, Nov 2001. 
  21. Static Index Pruning for Information Retrieval SystemsD. Carmel, D. Cohen, R. Fagin, E. Farhi, M. Herscovici, Y. Maarek and A. Soffer. SIGIR 2001, New Orleans, LA, Sept 2001. 
  22. Knowledge Encapsulation for Focused Search on Pervasive Devices, Y. Aridor, D. Carmel, R. Lempel, Y. S. Maarek and A. Soffer. WWW10, Hong-Kong, May 2001. 
  23. XML and Information Retrieval, Workshop Report, D. Carmel, Y. Maarek and A. Soffer. In SIGIR Forum, Fall 2000, Volume 34 Number 1. Also in SIGMOD Record: Volume 30, No 1, March 2001.
  24. Allowing users to weight search terms, Ronald Fagin and Yoelle S Maarek. RIAO’2000, Paris, France, Apr 2000. 
  25. Knowledge Agents on the Web, Yariv Aridor, David Carmel, Ronny Lempel, Aya Soffer and Yoelle S. Maarek . CIA’2000, Boston, MA, Jul 2000. Also appeared in “Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence” 1860, Klush and Kerschberg eds., Springer, July 2000, pp 15-26.  
1987-1999
  1. Morphological Disambiguation for Hebrew Search Systems, David Carmel and Yoelle Maarek. NGITS’99, Zikhron-Yaakov, Israel, July 1999. 
  2. Adding Support for Dynamic and Focused Search with Fetuccino, I. Ben-Shaul, M. Herscovici, M. Jacovi, Y.S. Maarek, D. Pelleg, M. Shtalhaim, V. Soroka and S. Ur. WWW8, Toronto, Canada, May 1999. 
  3. The Shark-Search Algorithm: An Application Web Site Mapping, M. Herscovici, M. Jacovi, Y.S. Maarek, D. Pelleg, M. Shtalhaim and S. Ur.  WWW7, Brisbane, Australia, April 1998. 
  4. WebCutter: A System for Dynamic and Tailorable Site Mapping, Yoelle S. Maarek, Michal Jacovi, Menachem Shtalhaim, Sigalit Ur, Dror Zernik and Israel Z. Ben Shaul. WWW6, Santa-Clara, CA, April 1997. 
  5. Coping with Java Security Restrictions in WebCutter, Yoelle S. Maarek, Michal Jacovi, Menachem Shtalhaim, Sigalit Ur, Dror Zernik and Israel Z. Ben Shaul. MASCOTS 97, Java Workshop, Eilat, Israel. Jan 1997. 
  6. Organizing documents to support browsing in Digital Libraries, Yoelle S. Maarek. In SIGOIS Bulletin, Special Issue on Digital Libraries, Guest Editor: Ann P. Bishop, Volume 16, Number 2, December 1995, 2-44. 
  7. Automatically Organizing Bookmarks per Contents, Yoelle S. Maarek and Israel Z. Ben Shaul. WWW5, Paris, France, May 1996.  
  8. GURU: Information Retrieval for Reuse, Yoelle S. Maarek, Daniel M. Berry, and Gail E. Kaiser. In “Landmark Contributions in Software Reuse and Reverse Engineering” edited by P. Hall, Unicom Seminars, Ltd., 1994. 
  9.  The Librarian’s Assistant: Automatically Assembling Books into Dynamic Bookshelves, Yoelle S. Maarek and Alan J. Wecker. RIAO’94, New York, NY 1994. 
  10. Introduction to Information Retrieval for Software Reuse, Yoelle S. Maarek. In “Advances in Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering Volume II”. V.Ambriola and G.Tortora eds, World Scientific Publishing Company, New Jersey, 1993 
  11. Using Natural Language Comments in a Structured Programming Environment to Increase  Program Understanding, William H. Harrison and Yoelle S. Maarek. AAAI Workshop on AI  and Automated Program Understanding, San Diego, CA, July 1992. 
  12. Automatically Constructing Simple Help Systems From Natural Language Documentation, Yoelle S. Maarek. In “Text-Based Intelligent Systems: Current Research and Practice in Information Extraction and Retrieval”’. Paul S. Jacobs, editor.   Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1992 
  13. Software library construction from an IR perspective, Yoelle S. Maarek. In SIGIR Forum, 25:2, Fall 1991, pp 8-18
  14. Integrating Information Retrieval and Domain Specific Approaches for Browsing and Retrieval in Object Oriented Class Libraries, Richard Helm and Yoelle S. Maarek. OOPSLA’91, Phoenix, AZ, Oct 1991. 
  15. An Information Retrieval Approach for Automatically Constructing Software Libraries, Yoelle S. Maarek, D. M. Berry and G. E. Kaiser. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 18:8, August 1991.
  16. An Information Retrieval Approach for Building Reuse Libraries, Yoelle S. Maarek, First International Workshop on Software Reusability, Dortmund, Germany, July 1991.
  17. A Text-Based Reuse System for UNIX Environments, Yoelle S. Maarek and Mark T. Kennedy. Usenix Workshop on Unix-Based Software Development Environments,  Dallas, TX, Jan 1991. 
  18. Indexing Software Components for Reuse by Using Natural Language Documentation, Yoelle S. Maarek. Third Annual Workshop on Methods and Tools for Reuse, Syracuse, NY, June 1990.
  19. Incremental Maintenance of Semantic Links in Dynamically Changing Hypertext Systems, Simon M. Kaplan and Yoelle S. Maarek. Interacting with Computers, 2(3), December 1990
  20. GCC: An Incremental Conceptual Clustering Algorithm with Input-Ordering Bias Correction, Yoelle S. Maarek. In Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language and Knowledge Base Systems, M.C. Golumbic ed., Springer Verlag, New York, 1990
  21. Automatically Generating Natural Language Help Systems From Free-Style Textual Documentation, Yoelle S. Maarek. AAAI Spring Symposium Series: Text-Based Intelligent Systems, pp 66-69, Stanford University, March 1990. 
  22. Full Text Indexing Based on Lexical Relations. An application: Software Libraries, Yoelle S. Maarek and Frank A. Smadja. SIGIR’89, Cambridge, MA, June 1989. 
  23. The Use of Lexical Affinities in Requirements Extraction, Yoelle S. Maarek and Daniel M. Berry, T. Fifth International Workshop on Software Specification and Design, Pittsburgh, PA, May 19-20 1989.
  24. Using Cluster Analysis for Assisting Maintenance of Large Software Systems, Yoelle S. Maarek . IEEE Israel Conference on Computer Systems and Software Engineering,  Tel Aviv, Israel, June 1988. 
  25. Change Management in Very Large Software Systems, Yoelle S. Maarek and Gail E. Kaiser. IEEE Phoenix Conference on Computer Systems and Communications, Scottsdale, AZ, March 1988. 
  26. On the Use of Conceptual Clustering for Classifying Reusable Ada Code, Yoelle S. Maarek and Gail E. Kaiser. ACM  SIGAda International Conference, Boston, MA, December 1987.