Latest
September 2024 Presented “Exploring the Interaction of Trust in Science and Vaccine Hesitancy” and “Introduction to National Internet Observatory” at the Trust and Safety Research Conference 2024.
July 2024 Presented “Introduction to National Internet Observatory” and “Revealing the Localness of News Domains through Sharing Patterns on Social Media” at IC2S2 2024.
June 2024 Presented “Introduction to National Internet Observatory” at the ICWSM 2024 Data Challenge.
March 2024 Presented “Locating the Asymmetry in Information Flow between Local and National Media on Transgender Discourses” at the Local Journalism Researchers Workshop 2024.
March 2024 Presented “Revealing the Localness of News Domains through Sharing Patterns on Social Media” at the Local Journalism Researchers Workshop 2024.
January 2024 Our work “Improving the TENOR of Labeling: Re-evaluating Topic Models for Content Analysis” got accepted at EACL 2024 (preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.16348.pdf)
About Me
I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute with David Lazer as my advisor. I recently defended my PhD thesis at the University of Maryland in the Computer Science program, working with colleagues at the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) lab, advised by Philip Resnik. My research interests span computational social science & natural language processing, including text-as-data applications in computational political science, analyzing framing in news and social media, understanding misinformation narratives, and improving topic model evaluation and their ability to assist practitioners. My collaborations over these projects include Microsoft Research, the Department of Government and Politics at UMD, and the Lazer Lab at Northeastern University. I finished my Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi in 2018, and completed my Master’s in CS at UMD in 2020.
Over the past year, I have been getting more and more interested in computational social science starting with applications in computational political science and understanding misinformation, with the social phenomenon of framing, including agenda-setting, a connective thread. My dissertation is titled: Analyzing communicative choices to understand their motivations, context-based variation, and social consequences. I am (eventually) looking to delve into how to make sure NLP systems do not help create and maintain social hierarchies and systemic biases that pervade our society (much like we know language can and does) — which requires understanding and collaboration in social sciences. I want to examine ways NLP and computational linguistics can be part of the solution (just like language can) with the understanding that sometimes the right thing to do is not to think about improving but scraping the technological ‘solution’ or tool.
I am lucky to have worked with many amazing people on extremely interesting topics and I look forward to exploring more!
I grew up in New Delhi, India.
Previously on ‘Latest’
December 2023 Our work “Inequalities in Online Representation: Who Follows Their Own Member of Congress on Twitter?” got accepted at Journal of Quantitative Description (JQD) (https://journalqd.org/article/view/4100) and received the Information Technology and Politics (ITP) Best Paper Award 2023 by the American Political Science Association (APSA).
November 2023 Our work “Natural Language Decompositions of Implicit Content Enable Better Text Representations” got accepted at EMNLP 2023 (https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.815.pdf)
October 2023 PhD dissertation is now publicly available online
September 2023 New position as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Network Science Institute, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University in the Boston area, with Prof. David Lazer.
August 29, 2023 Our work, “Donor Activity is Associated with US Legislators’ Attention to Political Issues”, is formally published in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291169
June 12, 2023 I successfully defended my PhD thesis on “Analyzing communicative choices to understand their motivations, context-based variation, and social consequences”! #PhDone
June 8, 2023 Our work, “Mainstream News Articles Co-Shared with Fake News Buttress Misinformation Narratives”, accepted at ICWSM 2023 (non-archival track) and presented in Cyprus, has been awarded the Outstanding Study Design award. (preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06459)
March 2023 Received the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship 2023.
November 15, 2022 Successfully proposed my dissertation on “Analyzing communicative choices to understand their motivations, context-based variation, and social consequences” and advanced to candidacy!
October 2022 Paper — “Are Neural Topic Models Broken?” — accepted for publication at Findings in EMNLP 2022.
October 2022 Poster presented at Text-as-Data 2022.
June 28, 2022 Talk at the Network Science Institute at Northeaster University on my ongoing work on Misinformation Narratives in Mainstream Media.
June 2022 - September 2022 Summer Research Fellowship at National Intitute of Science & Technology (NIST) community resilience program working on a human-in-the-loop document annotation tool, in collaboration with Prof. Jordan Boyd-Graber and Dr. Juan Fung.
September 2021 Paper on Is Automated Topic Model Evaluation Broken?: The Incoherence of Coherence accepted as at NeurIPS 2021 and selected for Spotlight Presentation!
June 2021 - (ongoing) Began collaborating with David Lazer and Lazer Lab on better understanding misinformation spread on Twitter.
May 2021/September 2021 Works exploring different uses of large pre-trained language models with colleagues at Microsoft Research accepted at NAACL 2021 and EMNLP 2021.
September 2020 Paper on Improving Neural Topic Models using Knowledge Distillation accepted as a long paper at EMNLP 2020! Joint work with Alexander Hoyle (we are both first authors) and Philip Resnik.
August 2020 We got an NSF grant for our idea and planned project on Modeling Co-Decisions: A Computational Framework Using Language and Metadata (story).
June 2020 - August 2020 Research Internship at MSR, Redmond with Nebojsa Jojic at the NLP Group.
October 2019 Paper on Probing Pre-trained Representations for Physical Common Sense Comparisons accepted at COIN (COmmonsense INference in Natural Language Processing) at EMNLP 2019!
June 2019 - August 2019 Research Internship at MSR, Redmond with Nebojsa Jojic at the NLP Group.
August 2018 Doctoral studies (in CS) begin at the University of Maryland, College Park.
May 2018 Long Paper on “How emotional are you? Neural Architectures for Emotion Intensity Prediction in Microblogs” accepted at COLING 2018!
May 2018 Gave an Oral Presentation for my paper at IWSDS 2018 on “Detecting Indirectness in Conversation”.
May 2018 Completed my Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT (BHU) Varanasi.