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 Creative language generation (both at sentence level and Long Form), Role Of Structured Common sense in Language Generation and teaching machines how to think critically in the realms of Discourse and Argumentation (Understanding and Generation). 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. Currently I advise the following students:

Arkadiy Saakyan (Columbia Undergad Fall 2020 - Present)

Fun fact about me :

• My first NLP paper has a Syntactic Ambiguity in it
• As a creative person, I think a lot about figurative comparisons and so I devised a model for generating similes now published in EMNLP proceedings
• Along with my brilliant colleague I built a model for generating stories now published in EMNLP proceedings
• I wrote an algorithm for generating sarcasm now published in ACL proceedings ;)

Recent News

• Submitted 2 first author long paper and 1 demo paper to NAACL 2021
• Our ACL 2020 Paper Deseption was taught in the Misinformation Detection Lecture(11/06) at UIUC "Information Extraction and Knowledge Acquisition" [Details here]
• Gave a talk at Columbia NLP Seminar on October 9th titled "The role of CommonSense in Figurative Language Generation" [Details here]
• 2/2 long papers on Controllable Creative NLG accepted at EMNLP 2020 main conference
• 1 long paper on Sarcasm Generation accepted at ACL 2020