Hey there!

I am a PhD student 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. I also work with Violet Peng at UCLA PLUS Lab. In the past I worked with Kathleen Mckeown. My research interests are broadly in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, with special focus in Figurative Language. Despite the ubiquity of figurative language across various forms of speech and writing, the vast majority of NLP research focuses primarily on literal language. Figurative language is challenging because of its implicit nature. I specifically focus on the following questions 1) Can LLMs understand/interpret them? 2) Can computers generate figurative language such as Sarcasm, Simile, Metaphor. 3) Can computers maintain the figurative aspects of language when translating it between language pairs. 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 want to work with me , please send me an email. I mentored the following students:

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

I am looking for part time CPT (<=20 hr /week) opportunities in ML /NLP opportunities. Please reach out to me

Fun fact about me :

• My first NLP paper has a Syntactic Ambiguity in it
• I built a demo on generating metaphors grounded by Lakoffs Conceptual Metaphoric theory
• I am a big believer in Computational Creativity and towards this I have worked on publishing papers which makes a computer generate Metaphors Similes, Sarcasm and Stories

Recent News

• New Preprint on Commonsense for Figurative Language Interpretation which are less compositional in nature
• 2 first author papers acepted to EMNLP 2021
• 2 long papers accepted to ACL 2021 main conference and 1 short paper accepted to Findings of ACL
• 2 long papers accepted to NAACL 2021
• I am a NYTimes R&D fellow starting Fall 2021
• Our ACL 2020 Paper Deseption was taught in the Misinformation Detection Lecture(11/06) at UIUC "Information Extraction and Knowledge Acquisition" [Details here]