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I am an Associate Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. Before this, I was an Assistant Professor at UC-Santa Cruz and a postdoctoral researcher in Dan Roth's group at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I finished my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park working with Dr. Hal Daume III.
Before joining UMD, I was a Blue Scholar in the Information Management team at IBM-India Research Labs, New Delhi from Aug. 2009 to Aug. 2011. My undergraduate years were spent in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur from where I graduated in 2009 as a BTech in Computer Science and Engineering.
My lab focuses on Nature Language Processing with a focus on narrative-like and socially aware understanding, summarization, and generation of language. You can find more details about and recent publications on my research page.
Note for prospective graduate students: Please check out my research and advisees pages to know more about our work or chat with my awesome students. Depending on the pool of applicants and my funding situation, I intend to take a student or so every year. If you are interested in working with me, please apply to our graduate program and list me as a faculty of interest.
Note for undergraduate students: If you are writing to me about working with me, introduce yourself (which year are you in) and your background (what you know about ML/NLP though this is not a pre-requisite), and include your resume and transcript. Also, I don't have summer internship positions in my lab.
If you are a graduate or undergraduate student and you are writing to me with a question that was not answered here, include "CMPS" in your subject so that it doesn't go to my spam folder and I know that you have read this :)
Some useful links:
Advice for prospective NLP PhD students. Some more grad-school application related advice.
Advice on how to prepare for an academic job.
Book on improving writing style.
General advice for new CS students, and here is an interesting video to watch for first time programmers.
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News:
-- May 2020: Our paper on MOOC forum analysis using multi-task learning has been accepted for EDM 2020. Congrats to Faeze Brahman.
-- April 2020: Two papers accepted for ACL 2020 on data-to-text generation and depression prediction. Congrats to Chao Zhao and Alex Rinaldi.
-- Jan 2020: Moved to UNC-CH.
-- Nov 2019: Our paper on aspect-aware review summarization will appear in AAAI 2020. Congrats to Chao Zhao.
-- July 2019: Thanks to Creative Next for covering our lab's work on storytelling. Listen to the podcast here: https://creativenext.org/episodes/ai-augmented-storytelling/
-- May 2019: Congratulations to my student, Faeze Brahman, for winning an award for her poster about automatic storytelling on UCSC's Data Science Day
-- April 2018: Joining as an Assistant professor at UCSC
-- April 8, 2016: Defended my dissertation!
-- December 10, 2015: Magazine article on our work here
-- November 12, 2015: 3 papers (on desire fulfillment and relationship modeling) accepted for presentation at AAAI 2016
-- August 21, 2015: Selected for attending the WPI STEM Faculty Launch Program
-- April 22, 2015: Awarded the Kulkarni Summer Research Fellowship by UMD for this summer.
-- March 12, 2015: My IBM PhD Fellowship was renewed. Thanks IBM :) News on CS@UMD
-- October 10, 2014: Won first place at the ACM SRC (Student Research Competition) held at Grace Hopper Conference, 2014. News on ACM webpage. (experience) (slides) (poster) (twitter)
-- April 18, 2014: Will be going back to IBM T J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights for internship this summer. I will be working with Dmitry Malioutov, Rick Lawrence and team.
-- Mar 5, 2014: Our paper titled 'Predicting Instructor Intervention in MOOC Forums' was accepted for presentation at ACL 2014
-- Feb 25, 2014: Won best poster award at Google DC PhD Summit, Washington DC
-- Feb 18,2014: Received IBM PhD Fellowship, 2014-15. News on CS@UMD's webpage.
-- December 27, 2013: Paper on 'Joint Question Clustering and Relevance Prediction for Open Domain Non-Factoid Question Answering' accepted at WWW2014
-- October 5, 2013: Attended the Grace Hopper Conference, 2013
-- September 18, 2013: Paper on 'Discriminatively Enhanced Topic Models' accepted in ICDM, 2013
-- July 23, 2013: Got the Grace Hopper Scholarship to attend the conference (view my profile here) Will be in Minneapolis in October.
-- Summer, 2013: I am an intern at IBM TJ Watson research Center working on QA with Vittorio Castelli and team.
-- Got my RA appointment letter for Spring 2012. I'll be working with Dr. Hal Daume III
--Attended Google Grad CS Forum at Mountain View, California, January 18-20, 2012
-- Found links to the Google India Women in Engineering Award :) here, here and here and also to IITK convocation awards see page 39
