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Ahmadou Wagne

ahmadou-wagne.jpg
Picture: Amélie Chapalain / TU Wien Informatics

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Short Bio

Ahmadou Wagne is a PhD student and project assistant at TU Wien, Austria. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Science and General and Comparative Linguistics from the University of Regensburg, Germany, and a Master’s degree in Data Science from TU Wien.

His research focuses on preference elicitation in multi-domain recommender systems with a conversational approach, especially in E-Commerce. This research is dedicated to better understanding a user’s preferences and facilitating their decision-making process. Beyond this, his academic interests extend to the fields of natural-language-processing and computational social science.

PhD Project - Preference Elicitation in Conversational Recommender Systems

Supervised by Julia Neidhardt

His research focuses on developing a conversational recommender system for the e-commerce domain, with a particular emphasis on how to construct user profiles by eliciting preferences through dialogue. Key challenges include handling heterogeneous and expansive product catalogs, designing effective representations for users and items, managing natural conversational flow, and integrating continuously changing item catalogues. The project is part of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Recommender Systems in collaboration with the price comparison platform Geizhals, with a strong focus on real-world applicability and evaluation methods that go beyond traditional prediction accuracy.

Publications and Conferences

Conference Proceedings

  • Wagne, A., & Neidhardt, J. (2024). Can We Integrate Items into Models? Knowledge Editing to Align LLMs with Product Catalogs. Sixth Knowledge-aware and Conversational Recommender Systems (KaRS) Workshop @ RecSys 2024 (pp. 56-65)
  • Wagne, A., & Neidhardt, J. (2024, October). What to compare? Towards understanding user sessions on price comparison platforms. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (pp. 1158-1162).
  • Wagne, A., Neidhardt, J., & Kolb, T. E. (2024, May). Popaut: An annotated corpus for populism detection in Austrian news comments. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) (pp. 12879-12892).
  • Kolb, T. E., Wagne, A., Sertkan, M., & Neidhardt, J. (2023, November). Potentials of combining local knowledge and LLMs for recommender systems. Proceedings of the Fifth Knowledge-aware and Conversational Recommender Systems Workshop co-located with 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2023) (pp. 61–64). CEUR-WS. org.

Journal Papers

  • Wagne, A., Le Foll, E., Frantz, F., & Lasser, J. (2025). Giving the outrage a name–how researchers are challenging employment conditions under the hashtags #IchBinHanna and #IchBinReyhan. Information, Communication & Society, 1-27.

Presentations