Xiana Carrera

New York, NY

x.carrera@columbia.edu

Hello! I’m a PhD student in Computer Science at Columbia University, working with Prof. Silvia Sellán. My research interests lie in Computer Graphics, specifically in Geometry Processing.

Last year, I collaborated as a researcher in Information Retrieval at CiTIUS (Research Centre in Intelligent Technologies of the University of Santiago de Compostela), where I focused on detecting and mitigating misinformation in the results of health-related queries, which was the main topic of one of my Bachelor Theses and two published papers.

When I’m not working, I’m usually watching movies or at the gym. I’m also a big fan of tennis, though I’m definitely better at watching than playing.

news

Dec 16, 2025	One paper accepted to ECIR 2026 (details coming soon).
Sep 01, 2025	Joined the PhD program at Columbia University.
Jul 17, 2025	Finished both my Informatics Engineering and Mathematics bachelors.
Apr 04, 2025	Short paper accepted to ACM SIGIR 2025.

Publications

SIGIR

Generating Effective Health-Related Queries for Promoting Reliable Search Results

Xiana Carrera, Marcos Fernández-Pichel, and David E. Losada

In Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Padua, Italy, 2025

Abs DOI

Misinformation on the Internet poses significant risks to users seeking health information. This paper addresses the challenge of generating effective health-related queries to promote reliable search results. We propose a method leveraging Large Language Models to generate synthetic narratives that guide the creation of alternative queries. These queries are designed to retrieve more helpful and fewer harmful documents compared to those retrieved by the original user queries. We evaluate the effectiveness of these queries using classic and neural retrieval models across multiple datasets, demonstrating promising improvements in retrieving reputable content.