Publications
Publications
In Preparation:
Ratna Kandala, Ali Faraji-Rad, Angelique Pershon, Vera Vine & Katie Hoemann. For daily well-being, the context-specificity of emotion words matters as much as the variety.
Ratna Kandala, Niels Vanhasbroeck & Katie Hoemann. FLAME: A New Dataset on FLemish Accounts of Momentary Experiences.
Under Review:
Ratna Kandala, Niels Vanhasbroeck, Bastiaan Tamm, Hugo Van hamme, Peter Kuppens, Batja Mesquita & Katie Hoemann. Toward an Ecology of Emotions in Daily Life. [Psyarxiv]
Niva Manchanda, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. "What if she doesn't feel the same?" What Happens When We Ask AI for Relationship Advice [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]
Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Samantha Adorno & Niva Manchanda. A Vision for Cultural Alignment: Opportunities and Safety Imperatives for AI in Mental Health Support.
Anamta Khan, Ratna Kandala, Deepti, Sheza Munir & Joyojeet Pal. Milking the Metaphors: Cultural Obfuscation in Wellness (COW) around Gomutra on YouTube using LLMs.
In Revision:
Ratna Kandala, Niels Vanhasbroeck & Katie Hoemann. Evaluating BERTopic on Open-Ended Data: A Case Study with Belgian Dutch Daily Narratives. [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.
Conference(s) (Main):
Ratna Kandala, Ali Faraji-Rad, Angelique Pershon, Vera Vine & Katie Hoemann (2026). Variety or Specificity? Comparing Emotional Diversity and Granularity in Daily Language, To Appear in the 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. To appear in the proceedings of the Will AI Light Up Human Creativity or Replace It?: Toward Well-Being AI for Co-evolving Human and Machine Intelligence, AAAI 2026 Spring Symposium Series.
Ratna Kandala & Akshata Kishore Moharir (2026). Graph Agents: Scaling Responsible Mental Healthcare. To appear in the proceedings of the AI in Business: Intelligent Transformation and Management, AAAI 2026 Spring Symposium Series.
Ratna Kandala & Katie Hoemann (2026). Modeling the Semantics of Emotion: A Culturally Grounded Approach to Flemish Narratives. To appear in the proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting 2026.
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):
Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir & Ratna Kandala. (2026). Designing Explainable Conversational Agentic Systems for Guarani Speakers. To appear in the proceedings of the Human-Centered Explainable AI (HCXAI) Workshop, 2026 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
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. [arXiv]
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). [arXiv]
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. (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.
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]