I am an Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). I obtained my Ph.D. degree and Master degree in Computer Science from Université de Montréal, advised by Prof. Jian-Yun Nie.

I have broad interests in Conversational and Interactive AI systems, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), Large Language Models (LLMs), Multilingualism, and AI for domain-specific applications.

I am currently recruiting Ph.D. students starting in Spring and Fall 2027. I am also looking for Bachelor and Master students for research project cooperation (both in person and remote) and dissertation/internship supervision (RIT students only). Please drop me an email if you are interested in working with me in any format.

News

• 2026.8 I have started a new position as Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)!
• 2026.7 We organized the first Workshop on Multilinguality in the Era of Large Language Models (MeLLMs) at ACL 2026.
• 2026.5 We presented the tutorial Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the Age of Agents at WWW 2026.
• 2026.4 We have six papers accepted by SIGIR 2026.
• 2026.4 We have six papers accepted by ACL 2026.
• 2026.1 We have one paper and one tutorial accepted by WWW 2026.

Honors and Awards

• Best Paper Award, AAAI 2026 Workshop on Agentic AI in Financial Services
• 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

Professional Experience

Amazon Rufus Team, Applied Scientist Intern

Palo Alto, Bay Area, USA — Aug 2025 – Nov 2025
Project: Optimizing Conversational Agent via Contextualized Reasoning
Palo Alto, Bay Area, USA — Jun 2024 – Dec 2024
Project: Unifying Retrieval and Generation for LLMs in Conversations
Advisors: Meng Jiang, Yifan Gao

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 a set of papers with different cooperators in top-tier conferences and prestigious journals, including ACL, WWW, SIGIR, EMNLP, KDD, CIKM, WSDM, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, ICDM, IPM, and ACM TOIS, etc.

The full publication list can be found in my Google Scholar.

• Fengran Mo, Zhan Su, Yuchen Hui, Jinghan Zhang, Jia Ao Sun, Zheyuan Liu, Chao Zhang, Tetsuya Sakai, Jian-Yun Nie. OpenDecoder: Open Large Language Model Decoding to Incorporate Document Quality in Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference, Dubai, UAE, 2026. [pdf] (Highlight as the Most Recently Exciting Study!)

• Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Sha Li, Hansi Zeng, Xin Liu, Zhaoxuan Tan, Xian Li, Jianshu Chen, Dakuo Wang, Meng Jiang. Agentic Conversational Search with Contextualized Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning. Findings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), San Diego, USA, 2026. [pdf]

• Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Yuchen Hui, Jia Ao Sun, Zhichao Xu, Zhan Su, Jian-Yun Nie. Convmix: A mixed-criteria data augmentation framework for conversational dense retrieval. Proceedings of the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Singapore 2026. [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, 2026. [pdf]

• 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, 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]

• Fengran Mo, Kaiyu Huang, 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. Artificial Intelligence Review (AIR) 2025. [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 & Speaker, Agentic Conversational Search, Tutorial at WWW 2026, Dubai, UAE.
• 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, 2026
• ACM SIG Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2024-2026
• ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2023–2026
• 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, 2026

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)
• Artificial Intelligence Review (AIR), Spring Nature
• Knowledge-Based Systems Journal (KBS), Spring Nature
• Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS), Spring Nature
• International Journal of Digital Earth (IJDE)

Teaching

• Information Retrieval CSCI 536/636.