Zhang Wenbo, a master's student who enrolled in the School of Information Management at Wuhan University (WHU) in 2022, received the "Best Paper Honorable Mention Award" at the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference (ACM SIGIR 2025) for his paper titled "Towards Better Evaluating Multi-Query Sessions: A Measure Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior".

The paper was co-authored by Professor Lu Wei, associate researcher Zhang Fan (corresponding author) from the School of Information Management, and senior algorithm engineer Chen Jia from Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, a popular Chinese social media platform.

This innovative research applies the theory of planned behavior from social psychology to model complex user behavior patterns in multi-query search sessions. It links user expectations with decision-making processes and considers the effects of bounded rationality on user behavior. Within this framework, the authors developed a user model for multi-query search sessions and introduced new evaluation metrics.

Experimental results showed that these new metrics significantly outperform existing ones in accurately modeling user behavior and predicting user satisfaction. Additional experiments revealed that user characteristics and task types influence preferences between result browsing and query reformulation.

The ACM SIGIR conference, established in 1978, is the leading international conference in information retrieval and is recognized as an A-class conference by the China Computer Federation (CCF). This year, it received 1,105 long paper submissions, accepted 238 papers, and awarded one Best Paper Award along with two Best Paper Honorable Mention Awards.