Danny To Eun Kim

Danny To Eun Kim
김도은
toeunkim{at}cmu{dot}edu

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I'm a second year PhD student at CMU Language Technologies Institute (LTI), advised by Prof. Fernando Diaz. My research interests span the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR), with recent emphasis on retrieval-enhanced machine learning (REML) and known-item retrieval.

Prior to CMU, while I was in the UK, I was a graduate researcher at Web Intelligence Group, University College London (UCL), where I received M.Eng. in Computer Science in 2022. I was working with Prof. Emine Yilmaz and Prof. Aldo Lipani on Conversational AI and User Simulation. Also, I was a member of both Knowledge Graphs and NLP interest group at The Alan Turing Institute.

During the summer of 2022, I interned at Raft as a Machine Learning Engineer, automating the paperwork in freight forwarding industry by OCR and NLP.
From May 2021, I joined team Condita as a main developer to compete in the first Amazon Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, where I spent significant amount of time, constructing a real-time, multi-modal, knowledge-intensive, and interactive conversational assistant; our team has made to the quarterfinals.
During my undergraduate degree, I worked with Prof. Marianna Obrist at UCL (Human-Computer) Interaction Centre, finding ways to cluster text-based stories by authors' smell experience.

I take pride in being one of the early members of the UCL Artifical Intelligence Society, and during my three years of active involvement, I had the privilege of founding the first Machine Learning tutorial series, which has become an annual tradition.

Check out my blog page if you are interested!

CV / Google Scholar / Blog / Twitter / GitHub

Follow @TEKnologyy

Table of Contents

Research / Publications /
Presentations & Workshops /
Teaching & Mentoring /

Research

Current Research:

Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning (REML) and RAG
Tip of the tonuge (known-item) retrieval

Theses

Selected Publications

	Tip of the Tongue Query Elicitation for Simulated Evaluation Yifan He^, To Eun Kim^, Fernando Diaz, Jaime Arguello, Bhaskar Mitra * denotes equal contribution. SIGIR, 2025 arXiv / LLM-Elicitation Code / Human-Elicitation Interface Code We introduce methods for eliciting TOT queries using large language models (LLMs) and human participants, enabling scalable and systematic evaluation of TOT retrieval systems. Our LLM-based simulator generates synthetic TOT queries that align well with human-created ones, while our human elicitation interface uses visual stimuli to induce the TOT state. These approaches reduce reliance on community question-answering data and expand query coverage to new domains. Our LLM-elicited queries are featured in the TREC 2024 TOT track, with the inclusion of human-elicited queries scheduled for TREC 2025.
	Towards Fair RAG: On the Impact of Fair Ranking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation To Eun Kim, Fernando Diaz Preprint, 2024 arXiv / code We conduct the first comprehensive study of fairness-aware ranking in RAG systems, focusing on both ranking fairness and attribution fairness—ensuring balanced exposure of retrieved documents and equitable crediting of sources. Analyzing 12 RAG models across 7 tasks, we find that fairness-aware retrieval often maintains or enhances both ranking effectiveness and generation quality. Our results highlight the importance of item-side fairness in retrieval and generation, providing key insights for building more responsible and equitable RAG systems.
	Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning: Synthesis and Opportunities To Eun Kim, Alireza Salemi, Andrew Drozdov, Fernando Diaz, Hamed Zamani Preprint, 2024 arXiv In this work, we posit that the paradigm of retrieval-enhancement can be extended to a broader spectrum of machine learning (ML) such as computer vision, time series prediction, and computational biology, not just limited to NLP. We introduce a formal framework of Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning (REML), by synthesizing the literature in various domains in ML with consistent notations.
	A Comprehensive Survey on Generative Diffusion Models for Structured Data Heejoon Koo, To Eun Kim Preprint, 2023 arXiv There is still a lack of literature and its reviews on structured data modelling via diffusion models, compared to other data modalities such as visual and textual data. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive review of recently proposed diffusion models in the field of structured data. First, this survey provides a concise overview of the score-based diffusion model theory, subsequently proceeding to the technical descriptions of the majority of pioneering works that used structured data in both data-driven general tasks and domain-specific applications. Thereafter, we analyse and discuss the limitations and challenges shown in existing works and suggest potential research directions.
	When and What to Ask Through World States and Text Instructions: IGLU NLP Challenge Solution Z. Shi, J. Ramos, To Eun Kim, X. Wang, H. Rahmani, Aldo Lipani * denotes equal contribution. IGLU NeurIPS Workshop, 2022 arXiv In the NeurIPS 2022 IGLU Challenge NLP Task, we address two key research questions: 1) when should the agent ask for clarification, and 2) what clarification questions should it ask. In this report, we briefly introduce our methods for the classification and ranking task. For the classification task, our model achieves an F1 score of 0.757, which placed the 3rd on the leaderboard. For the ranking task, our model achieves about 0.38 for Mean Reciprocal Rank by extending the traditional ranking model. Lastly, we discuss various neural approaches for the ranking task and future direction.
	A Multi-Task Based Neural Model to Simulate Users in Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems To Eun Kim, Aldo Lipani SIGIR, 2022 paper / poster / code Conversational User Simulator that 1) generates user-side utterance, 2) predicts user's next action and 3) satisfaction level by multi-task learning. SOTA in Satisfaction and Action prediction in USS dataset
	Condita: A State Machine Like Architecture for Multi-Modal Task Bots Jerome Ramos, To Eun Kim, Z. Shi, X. Fu, F. Ye, Y. Feng, Aldo Lipani * denotes equal contribution. Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge Proceedings, 2022 paper We present COoking-aNd-DIy-TAsk-based (Condita) task-oriented dialogue system, for the 2021 Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. Condita provides an engaging multi-modal agent that assists users in cooking and home improvement tasks, creating a memorable and enjoyable experience to users. We discuss Condita's state machine like architecture and analyze the various conversational strategies implemented that allowed us to achieve excellent performance throughout the competition.
	Attention-based Ingredient Phrase Parser Z. Shi, P. Ni, M. Wang, To Eun Kim, Aldo Lipani ESANN, 2022 paper / arXiv / code Spin-off research from the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. Assisting users to cook is one of these tasks that are expected to be solved by intelligent assistants, where ingredients and its corresponding attributes, such as name, unit, and quantity, should be provided to users precisely and promptly. To provide an engaged and successful conversational service to users for cooking tasks, we propose a new ingredient parsing model.

Presentations & Workshops

	Can Dialogue Systems Have Theory-of-Mind Ability? Presented at the NLP Interest Group at The Alan Turing Institute. 24th November, 2022 Recording / Slides Personal Knowledge Graphs: Towards Better Conversational Assistants Presented at the 5th Meet-up of Knowledge Graphs Interest Group at The Alan Turing Institute. 27th October, 2022 Recording / Slides
	A Multi-Task Based Neural Model to Simulate Users in Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems Presented at the SCAI: Search-Oriented Conversational AI Workshop 15th July, 2022 Recording / Slides