News:
July 2025:
Our work has been selected for presentation at WiML Symposium @ ICML 2025! (Vancouver, Canada)
"Using Contextual Embeddings to Map the Rich Topography of Everyday Emotion"
Served as a reviewer for COLM 2025
June 2025:
Served as a reviewer for NeurIPS 2025, ARR May 2025
New preprints:
Ratna Kandala, Katie Hoemann. Are Lexicon-Based Tools Still the Gold Standard for Valence Analysis in Low-Resource Flemish? [arXiv]
Ratna Kandala, Katie Hoemann. Evaluating BERTopic on Open-Ended Data: A Case Study with Belgian Dutch Daily Narratives. [arXiv]
Ratna Kandala. Conjoined Predication and Scalar Implicature. [arXiv]
Ratna Kandala, Prakash Mondal. A Unified Representation for Continuity and Discontinuity: Syntactic and Computational Motivations. [arXiv]
Ratna Kandala, Prakash Mondal. Towards A Unified System of Representation for Continuity and Discontinuity in Natural Language. [arXiv]
May 2025: Featured in the Weekly Scientist Spotlight Series, Women in AI (Post)
April 2025: Presented at the New England NLP Symposium 2025, Yale University, New Haven, CT
What's Hidden in Flemish Stories: How Can LLMs Unveil the Affective Nuances in Daily Narratives?
March 2025:
Presented a talk on "Comparing Topic Modeling Approaches Using Belgian-Dutch Daily Narratives" at the Brain, Behavior, and Quantitative Science (BBQ) Prosem, Dept. of Psychology, KU, Kansas, USA
An abstract "Using language to study the ecology of emotion in everyday life" selected for presentation at the 17th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina (July 2025)
An abstract 'Characterizing the breadth and diversity of everyday emotional events' selected for a talk at the symposium "Emotions from the participants' perspective: Open-ended approaches to studying labels, contexts, and response processes in daily life" at the Conference of the Society of Ambulatory Assessment (SAA) 2025, Leuven, Belgium (May 2025)
Feb 2025: Selected for the Oxford Machine Learning (OxML) Summer School 2025
Jan 2025:
Started CLiCK (Computational Linguistics Collective at Kansas), a reading group for Computational Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, KU
An abstract "Toward an Ecology of Emotion in Everyday Life" accepted for a talk at the 2025 Society for Affective Science (SAS 2025), Portland, Oregon (March 2025)
Dec 2024: I will be attending the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meet 2025 from Jan 9-12, 2025 in Philadelphia, USA.
Oct 2024:
I have started my postdoctoral research at the University of Kansas (KU), USA. I am working with Dr. Katie Hoemann, Dept. of Psychology, KU.
I am excited to be part of the Social Psychology group, which is renowned for its legacy shaped by distinguished figures such as Roger Barker and Fritz Heider.
Served as a reviewer for HRAIM 24, COLING25
Sep 2024:
Moved to the US
I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis and have been awarded a Ph.D. :)
I am grateful to my external reviewers: Professor Geoffrey J. Huck (York University, Canada), Dr. Ryan M. Nefdt (University of Cape Town, South Africa), and Dr. Pervez Ahmed (JNU, India) for their insightful remarks.
July 2024:
Won the Lingathon, the first hackathon in Linguistics conducted by the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics and Utrecht University along with my team members Yolanda Xavier, Irene Fally, and Iarina Albu (cash prize: 150 Euros)
Served as a reviewer for EMNLP-2024, LSA Annual Meet 2025
Volunteering as a TA for the Neuromatch Deep Learning course
June 2024: Served as a reviewer for ACL-2024
May 24: I submitted my Ph.D. thesis "Towards a Unified System of Representation for Continuity and Discontinuity in Natural Language" :)
May 24: Received the "Student Scholarship" at attend LREC-COLING-24 conference in Turin, Italy!
April 24: I will be a TA for the Deep Learning course at Neuromatch Academy this July! Yay!
March 24: A manuscript titled "On the Unified Representation of Continuity and Discontinuity and its Neuro-Cognitive Grounding" co-authored with my advisor Dr. Prakash Mondal has now been published in the journal Folia Linguistica.
Ferbruary 24:
Participated in the 3-Minute Talk competition during the Research Scholars Day 2024 at IITH
A manuscript titled "On the Unified Representation of Continuity and Discontinuity and its Neuro-Cognitive Grounding" co-authored with my advisor Dr. Prakash Mondal has been accepted for publication in the journal Folia Linguistica, published by Mouton de Gruyter.
Selected for the Oxford Machine Learning (OxML) Summer School 2024
Jan 24:
Chaired the session "Motion/Space: Acquisition & Psycholinguistics" at the LSA Annual Meet 2024
Chaired the session "Semantics and Pragmatics" at the LSA Annual Meet 2024
Presented my research at the Five Minute Linguist (5ML) event at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meet 2024 in New York City, USA
Attended the centennial LSA Annual Meet in New York City, USA
Dec 2023:
My research was presented at the Inter-IIT Tech Meet 12.0 at IIT Madras
Received COGEL Travel Grant awards 2024 Honorable Mention by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)
Nov 2023: Invited to present my research at the Inter-IIT Tech Meet 12.0 at IIT Madras
Oct 2023: Selection for the 5-Minute Linguist event is now published on the LSA Annual Meet 2024 website
Sep 2023: The paper presented at ICNLP 2023 is now published in IEEE Xplore
Aug 2023:
I am now a member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)
Abstract accepted for the Five-Minute Linguist (5ML) event at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meet 2024, New York City
A manuscript titled "A Pragmatic Analysis of Scalar Implicature in the Context of Conjoined Predication" co-authored with my advisor Dr. Prakash Mondal, is set to be published in the "Handbook of Linguistic Semantics: Bridging Theory, Philosophy, and Cognition" by Springer Nature
July 2023:
Selected for two summer schools in Greece and Russia
Successfully attended the FEAL 2023 Summer School, Chemnitz, Germany (online)
Successfully completed the 3-week intensive Deep Learning course at Neuromatch Academy
Attended the ACL 2023 conference (virtual)
I am now a member of the Cognitive Science Society (CSS)
I am now a member of Women in Cognitive Science
Successfully attended V-NYI # 7: The NYI Global Institute of Cultural, Cognitive, and Linguistic Studies
Granted a Full Fee Waiver to attend the ACL 2023 conference virtually
Selected for FEAL 2023 Summer School
June 2023:
I am now a member of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL)
Full waiver granted for attending the NMA Deep Learning course
May 2023:
Accepted for the Neuromatch (NMA) "Deep Learning" course, 2023
The paper presented at PACLIC36 has been published in ACL-Anthology
April 2023: My award news is now published on the IITH website under "Student Highlights"
March 2023:
Won the "Best Presentation" award for my talk at the 5th ICNLP, 2023
Presented the paper co-authored with my advisor Dr. Prakash Mondal, On the Implementation of the Algorithm for the Representation of Discontinuity in Natural Language at the 5th ICNLP 2023
Feb 2023: Paper accepted at the 5th ICNLP 2023
Oct 2022:
Presented the paper co-authored with my advisor Dr. Prakash Mondal, The Representation of Discontinuity and the Correspondence Principle at PACLIC36 (Online)
Aug 2022: Paper accepted at PACLIC36