Hey there!

I am a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Columbia University. Within the department I am a part of the Natural Language Processing group , where I am advised by Smaranda Muresan.My research is supported by the Columbia Center of Artifical Intelligence & Technology (CAIT) & Amazon Science Ph.D. Fellowship.During 2021-2022 I was a Computational Journalism fellow at NYTimes R&D.I also work with Violet Peng at UCLA PLUS Lab and He He at NYU ML².My research interests are broadly in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, with special focus in Computational Creativity.My overarching research question centers around how we can align large language models for creative tasks.I specifically focus on the following questions


1) Can LLMs understand and explain/interpret creative language? (EMNLP 2022, TACL 2022)
2) Can LLMs generate creative text such as Sarcasm, Simile, Metaphor, Stories? (ACL 2020, EMNLP 2020, NAACL 2021)
3) Can LLMs maintain semantic faithfulness when translating creative text? (EMNLP 2021).
4) Can LLMs keep learning tasks requiring creativity without forgetting knowledge about the general NLP tasks (EMNLP 2022)
5) Can humans effectively collaborate with LLMs that understands their intent and align with their expectations to produce creative content. (EMNLP 2022)
6) Can LLM's be helpful in aiding models trained on modalities other than language for creative tasks at hand (ACL 2023)

Prior to joining Grad school I was an engineer at UBER.For more information about me, see my CV or contact me.


My introduction to NLP was through my friend Chris Hidey who mentored me and helped me write several papers. As an act of giving back to the community, I am happy to advise undergrads and master students about grad school applications and/or how to get involved in NLP research. If you are at Columbia and have experience with Reinforcement Learning or Vision and Language and want to work with me , please send me an email. Before you email me please make sure we have overlapping research interests I mentored the following students:

Arkadiy Saakyan (Columbia Undergad)
Aadit Trivedi (Georgia Tech Undergad)

Here are some metaphoric illustrations from my upcoming paper

Recent News

• I will be giving a tutorial on Creative Language Generation at EMNLP 2023 with Vishakh Padmakumar, He He and Nanyun Peng
• Invited Talk at UMASS NLP and Shefield NLP
• I am interning in the Interactive AI team at Salesforce Research starting May 22,2023 where I am hosted by Jason Wu, Philippe Laban, Divyansh Agarwal
• I am interning in Google Deepmind starting August 21,2023 where I am hosted by David Reitter and Hannah Rashkin
• 2023 internship offers from Google Deepmind, Salesforce Research and Microsoft Semantic Machines so far
• Passed my candidacy exam. See slides here
• Recognized as an Outstanding reviewer at ACL 2022
• Awarded the CAIT PhD fellowship for the next two years