I joined the School of Computer Science and Technology at Soochow University in 2024, where I am currently an Associate Professor. My research lies at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, and large language models. I am particularly interested in conversational search and retrieval-augmented generation, memory and reasoning for LLM-based agents, long-document retrieval and reranking, legal AI, and efficient and trustworthy LLM systems.
I received my B.S. degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University, my M.S. degree from Xidian University, and my Ph.D. degree from Université Grenoble Alpes, France. During my Ph.D., I conducted research at the Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble (LIG), a joint research laboratory affiliated with CNRS and Université Grenoble Alpes, under the supervision of Prof. Eric Gaussier. If you are interested in academic collaboration, student supervision, or research discussions, please feel free to contact me by email.
Search, memory & reasoning for language AI.🔥 News
Congratulations to my master’s student Chao Zhang on receiving the National Scholarship for Graduate Students!
Our survey, A Survey of Long-Document Retrieval in the PLM and LLM Era, has been accepted by ACM TOIS.
Three papers accepted by EMNLP 2026: SAGA and Cascade-SC to the Main Conference, and EviRerank to Findings.
Retrieval-Feedback Aligned Distillation for Deployable LLM Query Expansion has been accepted for an oral presentation at NLPCC 2026.
Query Expansion in the Age of Pre-trained and Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey has been accepted by ACM TOIS.
📝 Selected Publications
* Corresponding author; † Co-first author.
EviRerank: Adaptive Evidence Construction for Long-Document LLM Reranking
Minghan Li*, Eric Gaussier, Juntao Li, Guodong Zhou
EMNLP 2026 Findings
- Adaptive evidence construction for efficient long-document LLM reranking.
Minghan Li*, Ercong Nie, Huiping Huang, Xinxuan Lv, Guodong Zhou
Information Fusion, 2026 (JCR Q1, CAAI-A journal, IF 17.4)
- Robust query expansion and rank fusion via dual-layer prompt ensembles.
GLIER: Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking for Legal Case Retrieval
Minghan Li*†, Tianrui Lv†, Chao Zhang, Guodong Zhou
ACL 2026 Main Conference
- Generative legal inference and evidence ranking for legal case retrieval.
S2G-RAG: Structured Sufficiency and Gap Judging for Iterative Retrieval-Augmented QA
Minghan Li*†, Junjie Zou†, Xinxuan Lv, Chao Zhang, Guodong Zhou
ACL 2026 Main Conference
- Iterative RAG with structured sufficiency judgment and gap-guided retrieval.
The Power of Selecting Key Blocks with Local Pre-ranking for Long Document Information Retrieval
Minghan Li, Diana Nicoleta Popa, Johan Chagnon, Yagmur Gizem Cinar, Eric Gaussier
ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 2023 (JCR Q1, CCF-A journal, IF 11.2)
- Key-block selection with local pre-ranking for long-document retrieval.
📚 Conference and Journal Papers
* Corresponding author; † Co-first author.
- TOIS 2026 A Survey of Long-Document Retrieval in the PLM and LLM Era
- TOIS 2026 Query Expansion in the Age of Pre-trained and Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
- Information Fusion 2026 Dual-Layer Prompt Ensembles: Leveraging System-and User-Level Instructions for Robust LLM-Based Query Expansion and Rank Fusion
- ACL 2026 Main Conference GLIER: Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking for Legal Case Retrieval
- ACL 2026 Main Conference S2G-RAG: Structured Sufficiency and Gap Judging for Iterative Retrieval-Augmented QA
- EMNLP 2026 Main Conference SAGA: Structured Applicability-Guided Alignment for Conversational Legal Retrieval
- EMNLP 2026 Main Conference Cascade-SC: A Pareto-Efficient Cross-Model Cascade for Test-Time Reasoning
- EMNLP 2026 Findings EviRerank: Adaptive Evidence Construction for Long-Document LLM Reranking
- NLPCC 2026 Conference Oral Retrieval-Feedback Aligned Distillation for Deployable LLM Query Expansion
- AACL-IJCNLP 2026 GenState-AI: State-Aware Dataset for Text-to-Video Retrieval on AI-Generated Videos
- AAAI 2026 RFKG-CoT: Relation-Driven Adaptive Hop-count Selection and Few-Shot Path Guidance for Knowledge-Aware QA
- COLING 2024 Domain Adaptation for Dense Retrieval and Conversational Dense Retrieval through Self-Supervision by Meticulous Pseudo-Relevance Labeling
- TOIS 2023 The Power of Selecting Key Blocks with Local Pre-ranking for Long Document Information Retrieval
- SIGIR 2022 BERT-based Dense Intra-ranking and Contextualized Late Interaction via Multi-task Learning for Long Document Retrieval
- AAAI 2022 Listwise Learning to Rank Based on Approximate Rank Indicators
- SIGIR 2021 KeyBLD: Selecting Key Blocks with Local Pre-ranking for Long Document Information Retrieval
- ICPR 2020 Learning to Rank for Active Learning: A Listwise Approach
🗂 Preprints and Surveys
arXiv 2026Automatic In-Domain Exemplar Construction and LLM-Based Refinement of Multi-LLM Expansions for Query Expansion, Minghan Li, Ercong Nie, Siqi Zhao, Tongna Chen, Huiping Huang, Guodong ZhouarXiv 2026Retrieval-Feedback-Driven Distillation and Preference Alignment for Efficient LLM-based Query Expansion, Minghan Li, Guodong ZhouarXiv 2025Enhanced Retrieval of Long Documents: Leveraging Fine-Grained Block Representations with Large Language Models, Minghan Li, Eric Gaussier, Guodong Zhou
💰 Research Grants
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) grant: Research on Causality-Enhanced Memory Mechanisms for Long-Term Conversational Agents, Principal Investigator.
- Soochow University Academic Start-up Fund, Principal Investigator.
- 2023 — Domain Transfer for Conversational Search, IDEX Université Grenoble Alpes, for a research visit to the National University of Singapore (NUS), Principal Investigator.
Academic Service
Area ChairACL Rolling Review (ARR)
Conference Reviewer / PC MemberAAAI, ACM SIGIR, ECIR, ACL, ICLR, NeurIPS
Journal ReviewerACM TOIS, IEEE TPAMI, Artificial Intelligence, IEEE TMC, ACM TKDD, Information Processing & Management (IP&M), Chinese Journal of Computers
📖 Educations
- Ph.D. in Computer Science,
Université Grenoble Alpes, France. - M.S. in Computer Technology,
Xidian University, China. - B.S. in Information Engineering,
Xi’an Jiaotong University, China.