IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) is the premier software engineering conference sponsored by ACM SIGSOFT and IEEE. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards are designated to recognize the outstanding research in the conference. At ASE 2025, 21 papers were honored with ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards, selected from 246 accepted papers out of 1,190 submissions
Junjie Huang is a 3rd-year PhD student in the ARISE lab under the supervision of Prof. Michael R. Lyu. He completed this research in collaboration with other three ARISE members, Yuedong Zhong, Guangba Yu, and Zhihan Jiang, as well as other co-authors Minzhi Yan, Wenfei Luan, Tianyu Yang, and Rui Ren from Huawei Cloud. The awarded paper, “iKnow: an Intent-Guided Chatbot for Cloud Operations with Retrieval-Augmented Generation”, focuses on a critical research topic of improving question answering quality in cloud operation domains. It analyzes the development and deployment of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks at a large-scale cloud company. The authors conduct detailed analysis, including query intents, answer requirements, current performance, and root causes of failed answers, and found the performance bottleneck of query imperfectness and retrieval effectiveness. Then the authors propose a new intent-guided RAG-based chatbot to address the issues, which enhances answer quality by a large margin. The authors also share their lessons learned from real-world deployment.
