Bhawna Piryani
Bhawna Piryani

PhD Researcher

University of Innsbruck

Bhawna Piryani is a PhD researcher specializing in Natural Language Processing, with a particular focus on Temporal Question Answering and Information Retrieval. Her research aims to develop advanced AI systems that can better understand and respond to time-sensitive queries, as well as improve information access from diverse sources including historical documents.

She is passionate about making information more accessible through improved natural language understanding and has published several papers on information retrieval and temporal aspects of question answering systems.

Research Interests
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Temporal Question Answering
  • Information Retrieval
  • Historical Document Retrieval
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Selected Publications
Abdelrahman Abdallah, Bhawna Piryani, Jonas Wallat, Avishek Anand, Adam Jatowt (2026). TempRetriever: Fusion-based Temporal Dense Passage Retrieval for Time-Sensitive Questions. WSDM ‘26.
Paper PDF
Bhawna Piryani, Jamshid Mozafari, Abdelrahman Abdallah, Antoine Doucet, Adam Jatowt (2025). Evaluating Robustness of LLMs in Question Answering on Multilingual Noisy OCR Data. CIKM'25.
Paper Code Dataset DOI Code Dataset PDF
Bhawna Piryani, Abdelrahman Abdallah, Jamshid Mozafari, Avishek Anand, Adam Jatowt (2025). It's High Time: A Survey of Temporal Question Answering. Arxiv 2025.
Paper Code Code PDF
Abdelrahman Abdallah, Jamshid Mozafari, Bhawna Piryani, Adam Jatowt (2025). DeAR: DeAR: Dual-Stage Document Reranking with Reasoning Agents via LLM Distillation. EMNLP 2025.
Paper Code DOI Code PDF
Abdelrahman Abdallah, Bhawna Piryani, Jamshid Mozafari, Mohammed Ali, Adam Jatowt (2025). How Good are LLM-based Rerankers? An Empirical Analysis of State-of-the-Art Reranking Models. EMNLP 2025.
Paper Code Dataset DOI Code Dataset PDF
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Experience

  1. PhD Researcher

    Data Science Group, Digital Science Center

    Responsibilities include:

    • Conducting research in Information Retrieval and Temporal Question Answering
    • Developing advanced AI systems for time-sensitive information retrieval
    • Publishing research papers in top-tier IR/NLP conferences
    • Collaborating with international research teams

  2. Software Engineer Intern

    LIS Nepal

    Responsibilities include:

    • Developed machine learning models for text classification
    • Improved data processing pipelines

Education

  1. PhD Computer Science

    University of Innsbruck

  2. Master of Computer Engineering

    Pokhara University
    GPA: 3.84/4
    Thesis: “Sentiment Analysis of Internet Memes Using Deep Learning Approaches”

  3. Bachelor of Computer Engineering

    Tribhuvan University
    GPA: 3/4
    Thesis: “Review’s Sentiment Analyzer”
Awards
PhD Scholarship Award
University of Innsbruck ∙ August 2022
Awarded a 4-year PhD scholarship for doctoral research in Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck.
Dean’s List Award
Pokhara University ∙ September 2020
Recognized for outstanding academic performance during Master of Computer Engineering program with a GPA of 3.84/4.
Master’s Semester Scholarship
Pokhara University ∙ March 2019
Awarded merit-based scholarship for one semester during Master of Computer Engineering program.