Ratna Kandala

Hello! I am Dr. Ratna. Welcome!

I am a computational biologist by background. I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the EMIC Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, under Dr. Katie Hoemann. I am working on applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to multilingual and multimodal datasets to understand how the language people use in daily life relates to emotions, behaviors, relationships, and well-being.

My research has been presented at various top conferences across disciplines: AI/ML (NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI), CV (ICCV), Data Mining (ICDM), Computational Linguistics/NLP (IJCNLP-AACL, PACLIC), Linguistics (Linguistic Society of America [LSA] Annual Meet, International Conference on Cognitive Linguistics [ICLC]), Psychology (Society for Affective Science [SAS] Annual Conference), and also academic journals (Folia Linguistica), among others.

Previously, I was a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH). I worked with Dr. Prakash Mondal in the Language and Cognition Group.

Before IITH, I obtained my masters in English Language Studies from the School of Humanities and Integrated Masters in Systems Biology from the School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH), where I worked with Dr. Joby Joseph, Center for Neural and Cognitive Sciences (CNCS) on understanding the algorithms and computational principles underlying the perception & behavior of the neural network(s) responsible for olfaction in insects.

Here is a short video explaining my entire Ph.D. work in less than 5 minutes (Presented at the LSA Annual Meet in New York City, Jan 2024):

A little more about me

My official name is Kandala Nirupama Sri Ranga Ratna. Unless we've met during high school, I go by the name Ratna. I was born in Warangal, India, and raised in Hyderabad. I hold a black belt in karate (Shotokan style). I practise Vipassana. My other interests include fitness, music, reading, dancing, and traveling.

Here is my CV (4/2025).I am always interested to hear about new opportunities. Feel free to contact me (including high school students/undergrads) through email for potential collaborative opportunities.

Recent News:

Dec 2025:

Presented work at NeurIPS 2025
Abstract accepted for the 2026 Society for Affective Science (SAS) Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, in March 2026!
2 upcoming talks at Singapore ACM SIGKDD Symposium 2026!

Nov 2025:

Manuscript "Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages: Bridging Patient Expression and Clinical Understanding through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation" has been accepted at IJCNLP-AACL NLP-AI4Health (Integrating NLP and AI for Multilingual and Patient-Centric Healthcare Communication Workshop) @ IIT Bombay (DEC 2025) [arXiv]
New OSF preprint! "Toward An Ecology of Emotion in Daily Life" [Psyarxiv]
Papers accepted at AAAI 2026!

"Evaluating Adaptive AI Support: Human Perceptions of LLM-Generated Relationship Advice" (LaCATODA workshop)

"Evaluating the Impact of LLM Relationship Advice on User Satisfaction and Attitude Change" [Bridging AI and Behavior Change (ABC)]

Acceptance at NeurIPS (Mexico City) :

"Do LLMs Give Good Romantic Relationship Advice? A Study on User Satisfaction and Attitude Change" (First Workshop on LLM Persona Modeling)

Speaker at the IEEE New Era AI 2025 World Leaders Summit, Seattle, USA.

Title: “Breaking the Black Box: How Explainable AI Transforms Digital Safety from Suspicion to Trust”

Oct 2025:

Part of the organizing committee that launched a North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) chapter at the Linguistics department, KU (2026). Website
Received "WiML Travel Grant" to present my work at NeurIPS 2025
Presented at the Stanford Graph Learning Workshop 2025

"Beyond Co-occurrence: Dynamic Emotion Word Graphs from Contextual Embeddings" (with Katie Hoemann)

Abstract "From Algorithm to Alliance: A Blueprint for Responsible and Explainable AI in Mental Health Screening" accepted for a talk at the eXCV Workshop at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025), Honolulu, Hawaii!

Sep 2025:

Gave a talk, "The Feelings We Name: Spontaneous Emotion Words as a Window into Daily Well-Being," at the Social Psychology Prosem Seminar Series, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas.
4 new acceptances at NeurIPS 2025 @ SanDiego!
Abstract "Modeling the Semantics of Emotion: A Culturally Grounded Approach to Flemish Narratives" was selected for a poster presentation at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting 2026 in New Orleans.
Abstract "Toward a Responsible Human-AI Alliance in Mental Health" selected for an oral presentation at the 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society @ Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Georgia.

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 Club 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

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