The most up-to-date record of my publications can be found on my Google Scholar.

Last update: May 2026

2026

  • Leif Azzopardi, Charles L. A. Clarke, Claudia Hauff, Yubin Kim, Zhaochun Ren, Adam Roegiest, Johanne R. Trippas and Saber Zerhoudi. The Third Search Futures Workshop at ECIR'26. In Advances in Information Retrieval, 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026), Delft, The Netherlands, Proceedings, Part III. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 16485. Springer, Cham (2026), pages 177–183, 2026.
  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. Beyond the Click: A Framework for Inferring Cognitive Traces in Search. In Proceedings of the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026), 2026.
  • Saber Zerhoudi, Adam Roegiest and Johanne R. Trippas. Simulation of Interactive Information Retrieval: A Guided Tour. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR'26), 2026.
  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. From SERPs to Agents: A Platform for Comparative Studies of Information Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR'26), pages 122–126, 2026.
  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. In-Browser Agents for Search Assistance. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR'26), pages 345–349, 2026.
  • Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Dinzinger, Michael Granitzer and Jelena Mitrovic. OwlerLite: Scope-and Freshness-Aware Web Retrieval for LLM Assistants. In arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.17824, 2026.
  • Saber Zerhoudi. OpenIIR: An Open Simulation Platform for Information Retrieval Research. In arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.09321, 2026.
  • Saber Zerhoudi. SimEval-IR: A Unified Toolkit and Benchmark Suite for Evaluating User Simulators and Search Sessions. In Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '26), July 20–24, 2026, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 2026.
    Code
  • Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Granitzer and Jelena Mitrović. NuggetIndex: Governed Atomic Retrieval for Maintainable RAG. In Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '26), July 20–24, 2026, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 2026.
    Code
  • Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Granitzer and Jelena Mitrović. AgentSim: A Platform for Verifiable Agent-Trace Simulation. In Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '26), July 20–24, 2026, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 2026.
    CodeData
  • Saber Zerhoudi, Adam Roegiest and Michael Granitzer. IIRSim Studio: A Dashboard for User Simulation. In Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '26), July 20–24, 2026, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 2026.
  • Saber Zerhoudi, Kanishka Ghosh Dastidar, Felix Klement, Artur Romazanov, Andreas Einwiller, Dang Hai Dang, Michael Dinzinger, Michael Granitzer, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Florian Lemmerich and Jelena Mitrović. Form Without Function: Agent Social Behavior in the Moltbook Network. In arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.13052, 2026.
  • Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Granitzer, Dang Hai Dang, Jelena Mitrović, Florian Lemmerich, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Stefan Katzenbeisser and Kanishka Ghosh Dastidar. Behind the Prompt: The Agent-User Problem in Information Retrieval. In arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.03630, 2026.
  • Alexander Nussbaumer, Michael Dinzinger, Sebastian Heineking, Gijs Hendriksen, Felix Holz, Saber Zerhoudi, Martin Potthast and Michael Granitzer. Creating Specialized RAG-Based Search Engines Using the Open Web Index. In Advances in Information Retrieval, 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026), Delft, The Netherlands, Proceedings, Part IV. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 16486. Springer, Cham (2026), pages 206–211, 2026.
  • Laura Caspari, Maik Fröbe, Sebastian Heineking, Michael Granitzer, Gijs Hendriksen, Djoerd Hiemstra, Martin Potthast, Arjen P. de Vries and Saber Zerhoudi. The Third International Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS). In Advances in Information Retrieval, 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026), Delft, The Netherlands, Proceedings, Part III. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 16485. Springer, Cham (2026), pages 231–238, 2026.
  • Nolwenn Bernard, Krisztian Balog, Saber Zerhoudi and ChengXiang Zhai. Large Language Models for the Simulation of Human Behavior. In Survey (under submission). HAL preprint hal-05484009, 2026.

2025

  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. UXSim: Towards a Hybrid User Search Simulation. In Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '25), 2025.
    PDFCite
  • Charles L. A. Clarke, Paul B. Kantor, Adam Roegiest, Johanne R. Trippas, Zhaochun Ren, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Xiao Fu, Yixing Fan, Michael Granitzer, David Graus, Maria Heuss, Jaap Kamps, Yibin Lei, Andrew Parry, Damiaan Reijnaers, Maarten de Rijke, Siddharth A. K. Singh, Yubao Tang, Suzan Verberne, Jonas Wallat, Yumeng Wang, Chen Xu, Andrew Yates, Saber Zerhoudi and Jujia Zhao. Report on the 2nd Search Futures Workshop at ECIR 2025. In SIGIR Forum, Volume 59, Issue 1, pages 1–28, 2025.
    PDFCite
  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. SearchLab: Exploring Conversational and Traditional Search Interfaces in Information Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR '25), Melbourne VIC, Australia, March 24–28, 2025, pages 382–389, 2025.
  • Sheikh Mastura Farzana, Maik Fröbe, Michael Granitzer, Gijs Hendriksen, Djoerd Hiemstra, Martin Potthast, Arjen P. de Vries and Saber Zerhoudi. The Second International Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS). In Proceedings of the 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2025), Part 5, pages 358–365, 2025.
  • Andrew Parry, Maik Fröbe, Harrisen Scells, Ferdinand Schlatt, Guglielmo Faggioli, Saber Zerhoudi, Sean MacAvaney and Eugene Yang. Variations in Relevance Judgments and the Shelf Life of Test Collections. In Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '25), Padua, Italy, July 13–18, 2025, pages 3387–3397, 2025.
  • Krisztian Balog, Nolwenn Bernard, Saber Zerhoudi and ChengXiang Zhai. Theory and Toolkits for User Simulation in the Era of Generative AI: User Modeling, Synthetic Data Generation, and System Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '25), Padua, Italy, July 13–18, 2025 (Half-day Tutorial), pages 4138–4141, 2025.
  • Philipp Schaer, Christin Katharina Kreutz, Krisztian Balog, Timo Breuer, Andreas Kruff, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Christine Bauer, Nolwenn Bernard, Nicola Ferro, Marcel Gohsen, Nurul Lubis and Saber Zerhoudi. Report on the Second Workshop on Simulations for Information Access (Sim4IA 2025) at SIGIR 2025. In ACM SIGIR Forum, Vol. 59, No. 2 (December 2025), pages 1–15, 2025.
  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. In-Browser Agentic Web: a Decentralized Approach to Information Access. In Open Search Symposium 2025 (OSSYM 2025), CSC IT Center for Science, Helsinki, Finland & Online, 8–10 October 2025. ISBN 978-92-9083-705-3; ISSN 2957-4935. Paper ID: RLM-P01, 2025.
  • Saber Zerhoudi. User Simulation in Interactive Information Retrieval: Methods and Frameworks for Simulating Complex Search Behavior. In Doctoral Thesis, Faculty of Informatics and Mathematics, University of Passau. Advisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Granitzer. Defense (Rigorosum): 19 September 2025, pages xii + 196, 2025.
  • Michael Granitzer, Mohamad Hayek, Sebastian Heineking, Gijs Hendriksen, Martin Golasowski, Michael Dinzinger and Saber Zerhoudi. OpenWebSearch.eu - Building an Open Web Index on EuroHPC JU Infrastructures. In Procedia Computer Science, Vol. 255 (2025), Proceedings of the Second EuroHPC user day, pages 43–52, 2025.

2024

  • Michael Granitzer, Stefan Voigt, Noor Afshan Fathima, Martin Golasowski, Christian Guetl, Tobias Hecking, Gijs Hendriksen, Djoerd Hiemstra, Jan Martinovic, Jelena Mitrovic, Izidor Mlakar, Stavros Moiras, Alexander Nussbaumer, Per Öster, Martin Potthast, Marjana Sencar Srdic, Sharikadze Megi, Katerina Slaninová, Benno Stein, Arjen P. de Vries, Vít Vondrák, Andreas Wagner and Saber Zerhoudi. Impact and development of an Open Web Index for open web search. In Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Volume 75, Issue 5, pages 512–520, 2024.
  • Sheikh Mastura Farzana, Maik Fröbe, Michael Granitzer, Gijs Hendriksen, Djoerd Hiemstra, Martin Potthast, Arjen P. de Vries and Saber Zerhoudi. Report on the 1st International Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS 2024) at ECIR 2024. In SIGIR Forum, Volume 58, Issue 1, pages 1–13, 2024.
  • Sean MacAvaney, Adam Roegiest, Aldo Lipani, Andrew Parry, Björn Engelmann, Christin Katharina Kreutz, Chuan Meng, Erlend Frayling, Eugene Yang, Ferdinand Schlatt, Guglielmo Faggioli, Harrisen Scells, Iana Atanassova, Jana Friese, Janek Bevendorff, Javier Sanz-Cruzado, Johanne R. Trippas, Kanaad Pathak, Kaustubh D. Dhole, Leif Azzopardi, Maik Fröbe, Marc Bertin, Nishchal Prasad, Saber Zerhoudi, Shuai Wang, Shubham Chatterjee, Thomas Jänich, Udo Kruschwitz, Xi Wang and Zijun Long. Report on the Collab-a-Thon at ECIR 2024. In SIGIR Forum, Volume 58, Issue 1, pages 1–11, 2024.
  • Timo Breuer, Christin Katharina Kreutz, Norbert Fuhr, Krisztian Balog, Philipp Schaer, Nolwenn Bernard, Ingo Frommholz, Marcel Gohsen, Kaixin Ji, Gareth J. F. Jones, Jüri Keller, Jiqun Liu, Martin Mladenov, Gabriella Pasi, Johanne R. Trippas, Xi Wang, Saber Zerhoudi and ChengXiang Zhai. Report on the 1st Workshop on Simulations for Information Access (Sim4IA 2024) at SIGIR 2024. In SIGIR Forum, Volume 58, Issue 2, pages 1–14, 2024.
  • Gijs Hendriksen, Michael Dinzinger, Sheikh Mastura Farzana, Noor Afshan Fathima, Maik Fröbe, Sebastian Schmidt, Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Granitzer, Matthias Hagen, Djoerd Hiemstra, Martin Potthast and Benno Stein. The Open Web Index - Crawling and Indexing the Web for Public Use. In Advances in Information Retrieval, 46th European Conference on IR Research (ECIR 2024), Part 5, pages 130–143, 2024.
  • Sheikh Mastura Farzana, Maik Fröbe, Gijs Hendriksen, Michael Granitzer, Djoerd Hiemstra, Martin Potthast and Saber Zerhoudi. The First International Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS). In Advances in Information Retrieval, 46th European Conference on IR Research (ECIR 2024), Part 5, 2024.
  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. Generative Agents Navigating Digital Libraries. In 26th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL 2024), Part 1, pages 171–188, 2024.
    ★ Best Paper
  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. Beyond Conventional Metrics: Assessing User Simulators in Information Retrieval. In Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR 2024), pages 3–12, 2024.
    PDF
  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. PersonaRAG: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems with User-Centric Agents. In Workshop on Information Retrieval for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (IR-RAG) at SIGIR 2024, pages 1–11, 2024.
  • Laura Caspari, Kanishka Ghosh Dastidar, Saber Zerhoudi, Jelena Mitrovic and Michael Granitzer. Beyond Benchmarks: Evaluating Embedding Model Similarity for Retrieval Augmented Generation Systems. In Workshop on Information Retrieval for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (IR-RAG) at SIGIR 2024, pages 62–70, 2024.
  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. Cognitive-Aware User Search Behavior Simulation. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2024), pages 20:1–20:12, 2024.
  • Leif Azzopardi, Timo Breuer, Björn Engelmann, Christin Katharina Kreutz, Sean MacAvaney, David Maxwell, Andrew Parry, Adam Roegiest, Xi Wang and Saber Zerhoudi. SimIIR 3: A Framework for the Simulation of Interactive and Conversational Information Retrieval. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific (SIGIR-AP 2024), 2024.

2022

  • Saber Zerhoudi, Sebastian Günther, Kim Plassmeier, Timo Borst, Christin Seifert, Matthias Hagen and Michael Granitzer. The SimIIR 2.0 Framework: User Types, Markov Model-Based Interaction Simulation, and Advanced Query Generation. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management (CIKM 2022), pages 4661–4666, 2022.
    ★ Best Paper
    PDF
  • Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Granitzer, Christin Seifert and Joerg Schloetterer. Evaluating Simulated User Interaction and Search Behaviour. In Advances in Information Retrieval, 44th European Conference on IR Research (ECIR 2022), Part II, pages 240–247, 2022.
  • Saber Zerhoudi and Michael Granitzer. Simulating User Querying Behavior Using Embedding Space Alignment. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2022), pages 386–394, 2022.
  • Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Granitzer, Christin Seifert and Jörg Schlötterer. Simulating User Interaction and Search Behaviour in Digital Libraries. In Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries (IRCDL 2022), 2022.
    PDF

2021

  • Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Granitzer, Jörg Schlötterer and Christin Seifert. Query Change as a Contextual Markov Model for Simulating User Search Behaviour. In Proceedings of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE 2021), pages 43–51, 2021.

2020

  • Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Granitzer and Mathieu Garchery. Improving Intrusion Detection Systems using Zero-Shot Recognition via Graph Embeddings. In 44th IEEE Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2020), pages 790–797, 2020.