Dissertation Award 2025: Weronika Łajewska

The Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society is pleased to announce that the 2025 NAIS Dissertation Award is awarded to Weronika Łajewska for her PhD thesis Grounded and Transparent Response Generation for Conversational Information-Seeking Systems. The dissertation was supervised by Krisztian Balog from the University of Stavanger.

Łajewska’s dissertation addresses a central challenge in modern AI systems: how conversational agents based on large language models can provide answers that are not only fluent but also reliable, grounded, and transparent to users. As conversational interfaces increasingly replace traditional search systems, users lose many of the cues, such as source links, that previously helped them assess the credibility and completeness of information. Her work develops new methods and evaluation frameworks to ensure that conversational systems can communicate uncertainty, provide evidence for their responses, and better support users in assessing the trustworthiness of generated answers. 

The thesis takes a comprehensive approach to conversational information-seeking systems. It combines reproducibility studies, user-centered evaluation, dataset creation, and novel system design to advance the state of the art. Among its contributions are new datasets and annotation resources for studying answerability and response completeness, a method for detecting unanswerable questions, and GINGER, a modular retrieval-augmented generation framework that produces grounded and controllable responses. The research also investigates how different forms of explanations, such as communicating system confidence or limitations, affect user trust and perceived usefulness. 

Łajewska’s work has received significant recognition from the international research community. During her PhD, her publications earned three Best Paper Awards at major international conferences, including SIGIR, ECIR, and CIKM, demonstrating sustained excellence across multiple years and venues. 

The evaluation committee highlighted several aspects that make this dissertation particularly outstanding. The work combines strong technical contributions with a clear focus on real-world usability, addressing pressing issues such as hallucinations, transparency, and user trust in large language models. In addition, Łajewska has demonstrated a strong commitment to open science by releasing datasets, annotations, and resources that enable further research in conversational AI.

This is the third time the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society has presented the Dissertation Award. For the 2025 cycle, four doctoral theses defended between December 1, 2024, and December 31, 2025, in the broad field of Artificial Intelligence were submitted for consideration. The evaluation was based on several criteria: the impact and quality of the research, the clarity of the writing, the quality of the publication venues, and other relevant information provided.

The NAIS Dissertation Award will be formally presented to Weronika Łajewska during the 2026 Scandinavian Conference on AI in Odense on June 16, 2026.