Farzad Shami

dblp:358/9997 · DBLP profile ↗
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5ranked-venue papers
3as first author
5since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0004-8174-0082ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 4 · 2 first-author · 4 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 GROKE: Vision-Free Navigation Instruction Evaluation via Graph Reasoning on OpenStreetMap
abstract
The evaluation of navigation instructions remains a persistent challenge in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) research.Traditional reference-based metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE fail to capture the functional utility of spatial directives, specifically whether an instruction successfully guides a navigator to the intended destination.Although existing VLN agents could serve as evaluators, their reliance on high-fidelity visual simulators introduces licensing constraints and computational costs, and perception errors further confound linguistic quality assessment.This paper introduces GROKE (Graph-based Reasoning over OSM Knowledge for instruction Evaluation), a vision-free training-free hierarchical LLMbased framework for evaluating navigation instructions using OpenStreetMap data.Through systematic ablation studies, we demonstrate that structured JSON and textual formats for spatial information substantially outperform grid-based and visual graph representations.Our hierarchical architecture combines subinstruction planning with topological graph navigation, reducing navigation error by 68.5% compared to heuristic and sampling baselines on the Map2Seq dataset.The agent's execution success, trajectory fidelity, and decision patterns serve as proxy metrics for functional navigability given OSM-visible landmarks and topology, establishing a scalable and interpretable evaluation paradigm without visual dependencies.
Farzad Shami, Subhrasankha Dey, Nico Van de Weghe, Henrikki Tenkanen
ACL (1)1
2026 From Single to Multi-agent Reasoning: Advancing GeneGPT for Genomics QA
Kimia Abedini, Farzad Shami, Gianmaria Silvello
ECIR (2)2
2026 Benchmarking Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Validation
abstract
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) store structured factual knowledge by linking entities through relationships, crucial for many applications. These applications depend on the KG's factual accuracy, so verifying facts is essential, yet challenging. Expert manual verification is ideal but impractical on a large scale. Automated methods show promise but are not ready for real-world KGs. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential with their semantic understanding and knowledge access, yet their suitability and effectiveness for KG fact validation remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce FactCheck, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs for KG fact validation across three key dimensions: (1) LLMs internal knowledge; (2) external evidence via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG); and (3) aggregated knowledge employing a multi-model consensus strategy. We evaluated open-source and commercial LLMs on three diverse real-world KGs. FactCheck also includes a RAG dataset with 2+ million documents tailored for KG fact validation. Additionally, we offer an interactive exploration platform for analyzing verification decisions. The experimental analyses demonstrate that while LLMs yield promising results, they are still not sufficiently stable and reliable to be used in real-world KG validation scenarios. Integrating external evidence through RAG methods yields fluctuating performance, providing inconsistent improvements over more streamlined approaches -- at higher computational costs. Similarly, strategies based on multi-model consensus do not consistently outperform individual models, underscoring the lack of a one-fits-all solution. These findings further emphasize the need for a benchmark like FactCheck to systematically evaluate and drive progress on this difficult yet crucial task.
Farzad Shami, Stefano Marchesin 0001, Gianmaria Silvello
EDBT1
2025 Doctron: A Web-based Collaborative Annotation Tool for Ground Truth Creation in IR
abstract
In Information Retrieval (IR), ground truth creation is a crucial yet resource-intensive task that relies on human experts to build test collections - essential for training and evaluating retrieval models. Large-scale evaluation campaigns, such as TREC and CLEF, demand significant human effort to produce reliable, high-quality annotations. To ease this process, tailored annotation tools are pivotal to supporting assessors and streamlining their workload. To this end, we introduce Doctron, a web-based, dockerized annotation tool designed to streamline ground truth creation for IR tasks. Doctron enables the annotation of both textual documents and images. It supports annotating textual passages, identifying relationships, tagging and linking entities, evaluating document relevance to a topic with graded labels, and performing object detection. It offers a collaborative environment where teams can work with defined user roles and permissions. The integration of Inter Annotator Agreement (IAA) measures helps to identify inconsistencies between annotators, thereby ensuring the reliability and high quality of the annotated ground truth data.
Ornella Irrera, Stefano Marchesin 0001, Farzad Shami, Gianmaria Silvello
SIGIR3
2025 Fact Verification in Knowledge Graphs Using LLMs
abstract
Automated fact-checking systems often struggle with trustworthiness, as they lack transparency in their reasoning processes and fail to handle relationships in data. This work presents FactCheck, a fact verification system topped by a web platform that shows how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be collectively used to verify facts within Knowledge Graphs (KGs). While the underlying verification engine implements a system that combines Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with an ensemble of LLMs to validate KG facts, the platform focuses on making the results of this complex process as transparent and accessible as possible. Users can explore how different models interpret the same evidence, compare their reasoning patterns, and understand the factors that lead to the final verification result. The platform supports technical users who want to analyze the model behavior and general users who need to verify whether the facts in the dataset are correct.
Farzad Shami, Stefano Marchesin 0001, Gianmaria Silvello
SIGIR1