I’m a researcher at Emory University’s Department of Computer Science working with Prof. Eugene Agichtein. I’m interested in a wide variety of problems which generally fall under Natural Language Processing & Information Retrieval.

I completed my bachelor’s from BITS Pilani, India after which I worked for 6 years in the domain of Conversational AI at Amelia.ai (IPsoft) in the wonderful cities of Bangalore & New York, consulted by Prof. Chris Manning. I was fortunate to work with the leadership of Amelia, including Uday Chinta and Chetan Dube and many fellow managers of other teams. I got the opportunity to lead the R&D team of around 15-20 enthusiasts working on diverse NLP topics viz., intent classification, slot tagging, VerbNet & PropBank parsing, KB-based QA, paraphrasing, semantic parsing, relation extraction & dialog retrieval, ranking, generation and other conversational AI problems. Much of the work also involved managing a team of back-end, front-end, and UX developers for creating different modules of the Amelia stack.

In the summers of the past 3 years (2022 to 2024), I worked with the Natural Understanding Team and Amazon AGI at Amazon, Alexa in New York, and San Jose on multi-task learning for their LLMs and creating simulators for training LLMs, and in the Search Experience Science team at Seattle ⛰️.

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Areas of Interest:

NLG Evaluation, Retrieval, Retrieval Augmented Generation, RAG Evaluation, LLM Biases & Stereotypes

Other Areas I'm happy to collaborate or have coffee chat ons:

Dialog Systems, Graph Neural Networks, Data Augmentation, Efficient Transformers, Privacy Preserving ML, Bigger Picture of LLMs

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Publications:

Most upto date stuff can be found on Semantic Scholar and Google Scholar.

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Workshops:

- Co-organizer of the Generation, Evaluation & Metrics Workshops GEM 2021, GEM 2022, GEM 2023.

- Co-organizer of the wisdom-of-researchers collaboration NL-Augmenter and a key contributor of LLM task benchmark BIG-Bench.

Recent Mentoring/Speaking:

- Presented some of the work on RAG evaluation at the Workshop on Task Focussed IR in the Era of Generative AI at Redmond, Microsoft Research

- Gave a talk on Retrieval Augmented Generation at the University of Edinburgh, 2024 while on my visit to present LLM based reformulation at ECIR 2024, Scotland

- Mentored 5 graduate students on efficient variants of GNNs at the London Geometry & Machine Learning Summer School, 2022

- Invited as Speaker & Guest of Honour at VIT's ICAITR 2021, Mumbai. Gave a short talk on "NLP in the Past Decade"

- Bioinformatics article was featured on Global Medical Discovery [ISSN 1929-8536] as a Key Scientific Article contributing to excellence in biomedical research.

Recent Lectures on Retrieval Augmented Generation (May 2024):

Other Projects:

If you want to get in touch or are interested to collaborate, you can reach me at firstname.lastname@emory.edu (or LinkedIN or Twitter where I’m sometimes active.)

Long ago, I used to maintain a personal blog on WordPress where I mostly wrote non-NLP stuff on rare occasions! You can find some of my random writings on Politics, Linguistics, some book reviews and sometimes when I’ve gone backpacking! One serious advice - cook this!

Mentoring at Amelia R&D (2015 to 2021):

I had the privilege of mentoring several great individuals, particularly on NLP projects at Amelia R&D. Most of these projects were as short as 1 month to as long as 1 year. Some are listed here, in no particular order:

R&D/Senior R&D Engineers: Krishna Mohan Barakam, Ashish Srivastava, Aadesh Gupta, Abhinav Bhatt, Arpan Kulshreshtha, Priyank Soni, Venkatesh Magham, Anurag Kashyap, Kaustav Dutta, Ramavtar Malav, Vishwa Teja, Manjunath Hegde, Roopesh Mangal, Mohit Rohatgi, Rohit Kalra

Interns: Bhargav Sagiraju, Chandra Reddy, Pranav Kamojjhala