PhD student in Computer Science at Stony Brook; affiliated with LUNR lab
Advisor: Niranjan Balasubramanian.
Email: ylal <at> cs.stonybrook <dot> edu
Hi! I'm a fifth-year PhD student at Stony Brook. I work on implicit reasoning problems on diverse types of texts. Particularly, I focus on evaluating and improving the abilities of NLP models to answer why questions that elicit different aspects of reasoning on stories and plans. I collaborate extensively with Nate Chambers and Ray Mooney on this line of work. I am also interested in understanding how well large language models (LLMs) understand the social and personal aspects of reasoning expressed in language, working with H. Andrew Schwartz.
Previously, I have dabbled with problems in analyzing energy efficiency of pretrained models, machine translation, clickbait detection and word sense disambiguation.
I graduated with a Master's degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University in May 2020. I was primarily advised by Philipp Koehn and worked on a variety of problems across natural language processing.
Over the years, I have been involved in several notable side projects. I worked on a chat platform - Ping - that allowed users to communicate with each other regardless of language. I was involved in efforts to build a service - hello friend - that allowed people without internet access to avail various crucial facilities. In a past life, I was an iOS developer for several small-scale applications.
Presented CaT-Bench at the NYC ML Symposium organized by the New York Academy of Sciences.
Long paper accepted to EMNLP, 2024. I am also co-organizing WNU 2024. I'll be attending in-person. See you in sunny Miami!
Paper from my AI2 Internship accepted to ACL (Findings), 2024. I will be presenting it at the NLRSE workshop. See you in Bangkok!
Paper from my Google Research Internship accepted to TrustNLP workshop collocated with NAACL, 2024. I'll be presenting in Mexico City!
Short paper accepted to EACL, 2024.
I am spending the Fall semester at Google Research with the Responsible, Application-Driven Machine Learning (RADML) team in the Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology (RAI-HCT) org working with Ananth Balashankar, Ahmad Beirami and Preethi Lahoti.
Short paper accepted to ACL, 2023. Another accepted to a workshop (WASSA). My co-authors will be presenting in Toronto!
I am spending the summer at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in the Aristo team working with Niket Tandon.
Long paper accepted to EMNLP, 2022. I'll be attending in-person. See you in Abu Dhabi!
I am spending the summer working on question decomposition for multi-hop question answering at Salesforce Research with Semih Yavuz and Yingbo Zhou.
Presenting work on using commonsense knowledge to answer why questions in stories at WNU 2022. See you in Seattle!
Two papers accepted at ACL, 2021 --- one in main conference, one in Findings