Publications
Publications
In Preparation:
Holy Cow! Can LLMs Detect Sarcasm in Culturally-Charged Indian Discourse?
Under Review:
Ratna Kandala, Niels Vanhasbroeck, Eva Ceulemans, Miryam de Lhoneux & Katie Hoemann. Syntactic analysis provides nuanced insight into linguistic distancing’s relationship with momentary affect. [Psyarxiv]
Ratna Kandala, Niels Vanhasbroeck, Bastiaan Tamm, Hugo Van hamme, Peter Kuppens, Batja Mesquita & Katie Hoemann. Toward an Ecology of Emotions in Daily Life. [Psyarxiv]
Srimonti Dutta, Ratna Kandala. Mental Health AI Safety Claims Must Preserve Temporal Evidence. [arXiv]
Ratna Kandala, Niva Manchanda, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ananth Kandala. EchoGuard: An Agentic Framework Using Knowledge Graphs as Episodic Memory to Scaffold Awareness of Manipulative Communication [arXiv]
Conference(s) (Main):
Ratna Kandala, Niels Vanhasbroeck & Katie Hoemann (2026). FLAME: A New Dataset on FLemish Accounts of Momentary Experiences. [arXiv] EMNLP Findings
Ratna Kandala, Ali Faraji-Rad, Angelique Pershon, Vera Vine & Katie Hoemann (2026). Variety or Specificity? Comparing Emotional Diversity and Granularity in Daily Language, In proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci).
Ratna Kandala & Akshata Kishore Moharir (2026). How Human-AI Collaboration Illuminates Mental Health Care. Will AI Light Up Human Creativity or Replace It?: Toward Well-Being AI for Co-evolving Human and Machine Intelligence, Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series, 8(1), pg. 674-676
Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann (2026). Modeling the Semantics of Emotion: A Culturally Grounded Approach to Flemish Narratives. In proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting 2026. Link
Ratna Nirupama & Prakash Mondal. (2023). On the Implementation of the Algorithm for Representation of Discontinuity in Natural Language. ICNLP 2023. (IEEE Xplore) Link Best Presentation Award
Ratna Nirupama & Prakash Mondal. (2022). The Representation of Discontinuity and the Correspondence Principle. PACLIC36. (ACL-Anthology) Link
Conference(s) (Workshops):
Anamta Khan, Ratna Kandala, Deepti, Sheza Munir & Joyojeet Pal. (2026). When Cow Urine Cures Constipation on YouTube: Limits of LLMs in Detecting Culture-specific Health Misinformation. In proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Misinformation Detection in the Era of LLMs (MisD), The 20th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM). [Link]
Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. (2026). An Oral-first Interactive Agentic System for Guaraní Speakers. In Proceedings of LANLP: Bridging Ibero and Latin American NLP Communities (pp. 9–14), European Language Resources Association (ELRA), LREC [Link]
Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Samantha Adorno & Niva Manchanda. (2026). A Vision for Cultural Alignment: Opportunities and Safety Imperatives for AI in Mental Health Support. Culture X AI Workshop, ICML.
Niva Manchanda, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. "What if she doesn't feel the same?" What Happens When We Ask AI for Relationship Advice, AAAI Bridge Program [arXiv]
Ananth Kandala, Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Niva Manchanda & Sunaina Singh (2025). Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages: Bridging Patient Expression and Clinical Understanding through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation. To appear in the proceedings of the NLP-AI4Health (Integrating NLP and AI for Multilingual and Patient-Centric Healthcare Communication) workshop, IJCNLP-AACL 2025. [Link]
Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann. (2025). LLMs vs. Traditional Sentiment Tools in Psychology: An Evaluation on Belgian-Dutch Narratives. Workshop on Evaluating the Evolving LLM Lifecycle: Benchmarks, Emergent Abilities, and Scaling. The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025. [arXiv]
Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Divya Nayak. (2025). From Explainability to Action: A Generative Operational Framework for Integrating XAI in Clinical Mental Health Screening. In Proceedings of the MHSM 2025 Workshop at the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM '25) (IEEE Xplore). [Link]
Ratna Nirupama & Prakash Mondal. (2024). On the Unified Representation of Continuity and Discontinuity and its Neuro-Cognitive Grounding. Folia Linguistica, Mouton de Gruyter. Link
Ratna Kandala, Ali Faraji-Rad, Jeffrey M. Girard, Angelique Pershon, Vera Vine & Katie Hoemann. For daily well-being, the context-specificity of emotion words matters as much as the variety. [Psyarxiv] Emotion (Under Revision)
Ratna Kandala. (2025). Conjoined Predication and Scalar Implicature (forthcoming in The Handbook of Semantics, Springer Nature). [arXiv]
Blog Posts:
Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala (2026). Loneliness as a Case Study for Social Reward Misalignment. ICLR Blog Post. [Link]
Ratna Kandala & Akshata Kishore Moharir (2025). XAI: Explaining How AI Makes Decisions. NeurIPS 2025 Education Program, NeurIPS. [Link]
Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann. Are Lexicon-Based Tools Still the Gold Standard for Valence Analysis in Low-Resource Flemish? [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]
Sheza Munir, Ratna Kandala, Anamta Khan, Deepti & Joyojeet Pal. Dharma, Data, and Deception: An LLM-Powered Rhetorical Analysis of Cow-Urine Health Claims on YouTube. [arXiv]