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ACM SIGIR Gerard Salton Award, 2021, "for significant and sustained contributions to information retrieval and data science. His work has defined many of the theoretical foundations of the language modeling approach, yielding major insights into areas such as smoothing methods, relevance feedback, topic diversification, and text representations that incorporate positional information. He and his collaborators have also pioneered the axiomatic approach to information retrieval, which continues to provide inspiration for retrieval model and evaluation research." • ACM SIGIR
Academy inductee, 2021 •
ACM Fellow, 2017, "for contributions to information retrieval and text data mining." • ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award, 2016, for paper
A study of smoothing methods for language models applied to Ad Hoc information retrieval • ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award, 2016, for paper
Document language models, query models, and risk minimization for information retrieval • ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award, 2014, for paper
Beyond independent relevance: methods and evaluation metrics for subtopic retrieval •
ACM Distinguished Member, 2009 •
Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), 2004, "for his work on user-centered, adaptive intelligent information access. His techniques expect to improve search-engine performance, support better information organization and enable understanding of large volumes of information. Zhai's work in information retrieval is expected to enhance curricula and provide new educational tools for the growing information technology workforce." • ACM SIGIR Best Paper Award, 2004, for paper
A formal study of information retrieval heuristics ==Personal==