About Me
I am an Applied Scientist with the Alexa Shopping Science team at Amazon. I received my PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the Ohio State University (OSU) in August 2020, under the guidance of Prof. Srinivasan Parthasarathy. I have interned at Amazon, Adobe Research, Nokia Bell Labs (Ireland), and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Bombay). My research interests lie in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval and Social Computing. In particular, I am interested in:
- NLP, NLU and NLG: Solving problems involving natural language processing, understanding and generation techniques such as intent discovery, summarization, fact checking and question answering.
- Conversational AI: This includes generating effective and natural sounding responses for dialogue systems, and assessing conversation quality.
- Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Extracting, interpreting and transforming web or digital content into structured knowledge representations for various downstream applications such as question answering, search and recommendation.
- Human Behavior Understanding: Obtaining and analyzing user behavior characteristics from heterogeneous data sources for interdisciplinary applications such as public health, shopping and marketing.
News
- 03/2024: Our paper "Leveraging Interesting Facts to Enhance User Engagement with Conversational Interfaces" was accepted at NAACL 2024 in Mexico!
- 05/2023: Our paper "Faithful Low-Resource Data-to-Text Generation through Cycle Training" received the Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2023 in Toronto, Canada!
- 04/2023: Our paper "Disentangling User Conversations with Voice Assistants for Online Shopping" was accepted at SIGIR 2023 in Taipei, Taiwan!
- 10/2022: Our paper "Generating Explainable Product Comparisons for Online Shopping" was accepted at WSDM 2023 in Singapore!
- 09/2022: Our paper "Fact Checking Machine Generated Text with Dependency Trees" was accepted at EMNLP 2022 (industry track) in Abu Dhabi, UAE!
- 08/2022: Our paper "Wizard of Tasks: A Novel Conversational Dataset for Solving Real-World Tasks in Conversational Settings" was accepted for oral presentation at COLING 2022 in Gyeongju, South Korea.
- 05/2022: Gave an invited talk at Lehigh University (virtual).
- 01/2022: Our work "ADVIN: Automatically Discovering Novel Domains and Intents from User Utterances" was accepted at ICASSP 2022 in Singapore for oral presentation.
- 11/2021: Our work "What Matters for Shoppers: Investigating Key Attributes for Product Comparison" was accepted at ECIR 2022 in Norway.
- 08/2021: Our work "Open Intent Discovery from Natural Language Interactions" was invited for a presentation at the Sister Conferences Best Papers Track of IJCAI 2021 in Montreal (virtual)
- 03/2021: I was a panelist at the Amazon Science panel at WSDM 2021 in Israel (virtual)
- 03/2021: Our work "FACE-KEG: Fact Checking Explained using Knowledge Graphs" received a Best Paper Honorable Mention at WSDM 2021 in Israel (virtual)!
- 12/2020: Gave an invited talk at Georgia State University (virtual)
- 09/2020: Gave an invited talk at the University of South Carolina (virtual)
- 09/2020: I have been invited to present my PhD work at the Microsoft AI Breakthroughs Workshop (virtual).
- 08/2020: Started my journey as an Applied Scientist with the Alexa Shopping Science Team at Amazon!
- 08/2020: I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the Ohio State University! Check out my PhD Dissertation!
- 05/2020: Our work "Open Intent Discovery from Natural Language Interactions" received the Best Paper Award at The Web Conference (WWW 2020) in Taipei, Taiwan!
- 04/2020: Honored to receive the Graduate Student Research Award from OSU's CSE department!
- 01/2020: Honored to receive the Presidential Fellowship from the OSU Graduate School! ("The Presidential Fellowship is the most prestigious award given by the Graduate School. Recipients of this award embody the highest standards of scholarship in the full range of Ohio State's graduate programs.")
- 10/2019: Excited to attend the Rising Stars in EECS Academic Career Workshop at UIUC!
- 05/2019: Presented our work "BOLT-K: Bootstrapping Ontology Learning via Transfer of Knowledge" at The Web Conference (WWW 2019) in San Francisco, CA.
- 05/2019: Began my internship at Amazon NLU Science, Boston!
- 07/2018: Attended SIGIR 2018 in Ann Arbor, MI and presented our papers "ETF: Enriching Taxonomies with Functional Domain Knowledge", and "Modeling Transportation Uncertainty in Matching Help Seekers and Suppliers during Disasters."
- 07/2018: Attended ICWSM 2018 in Stanford, CA.
- 05/2018: Started my internship at Adobe Research, San Jose!
- 11/2017: Attended ICDM 2017 in New Orleans, LA and presented our work "Multimodal Content Analysis for Effective Advertisements on YouTube."
- 07/2017: Attended ACM Digital Health (DH) 2017 in London, UK and presented our work "Emotional and Linguistic Cues of Depression from Social Media."
- 05/2017: Started my internship at Nokia Bell Labs, Ireland!
- 04/2017: Attended the ACM CRA Graduate Cohort Workshop for Women in Washington D.C.
- 08/2016: Attended SIGKDD 2016 and presented our work "Predicting Trust Relations Among Users in a Social Network: The Role of Influence, Cohesion and Valence." (WISDOM@SIGKDD)
Publications & Patents
- Nikhita Vedula, Giuseppe Castellucci, Eugene Agichtein, Oleg Rokhlenko and Shervin Malmasi. "Leveraging Interesting Facts to Enhance User Engagement with Conversational Interfaces." In Proceedings of the North Americal Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL) , 2024 (to appear).
- Besnik Fetahu, Tejas Mehta, Qun Song, Nikhita Vedula, Oleg Rokhlenko and Shervin Malmasi. "Instant answering in e-commerce buyer-seller messaging using message-to-question reformulation." In Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) , 2024.
- Zhuoer Wang, Marcus Collins*, Nikhita Vedula*, Simone Filice, Shervin Malmasi and Oleg Rokhlenko. "Faithful Low-Resource Data-to-Text Generation through Cycle Training." In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Long papers) , 2023 (Outstanding Paper Award). * indicates equal contribution.
- Nikhita Vedula, Marcus Collins and Oleg Rokhlenko. "Disentangling User Conversations with Voice Assistants for Online Shopping." In Proceedings of the ACM SIG Conference on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) , 2023.
- Nikhita Vedula, Marcus Collins, Eugene Agichtein and Oleg Rokhlenko. "Generating Explainable Product Comparisons for Online Shopping." In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) , 2023.
- Alex Estes*, Nikhita Vedula*, Marcus Collins*, Matt Cecil and Oleg Rokhlenko. "Fact Checking Machine Generated Text with Dependency Trees." In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) , 2022. * indicates equal contribution.
- Jason Choi, Saar Kuzi, Nikhita Vedula, Jie Zhao, Giuseppe Castellucci, Marcus Collins, Shervin Malmasi, Oleg Rokhlenko and Eugene Agichtein. "Wizard of Tasks: A Novel Conversational Dataset for Solving Real-World Tasks in Conversational Settings." In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING) , 2022.
- Nikhita Vedula, Rahul Gupta, Aman Alok, Mukund Sridhar and Shankar Ananthakrishnan. "Automated Discovery of Novel Domains and Intents from Text Utterances." In Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing (ICASSP) , 2022.
- Nikhita Vedula, Marcus Collins, Eugene Agichtein and Oleg Rokhlenko. "What Matters for Shoppers: Investigating Key Attributes for Product Comparison." In Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), 2022.
- Nikhita Vedula, Nedim Lipka, Pranav Maneriker and Srinivasan Parthasarathy. "Open Intent Discovery from Natural Language Interactions (Extended Abstract)." In Proceedings of the Sister Conferences Best Papers Track at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2021.
- Nikhita Vedula and Srinivasan Parthasarathy. "FACE-KEG: Fact Checking Explained via Knowledge Graphs." In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), 2021 (Best Paper Honorable Mention).
- Nikhita Vedula. "Modelling Knowledge and Functional Intent for Context-Aware Pragmatic Analysis." ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, 2020.
- Nikhita Vedula. "Modelling Knowledge and Functional Intent for Context-Aware Pragmatic Analysis." PhD Dissertation, Ohio State University, 2020.
- Nikhita Vedula, Nedim Lipka, Pranav Maneriker and Srinivasan Parthasarathy. "Open Intent Discovery from Natural Language Interactions." In Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), 2020 (Best Paper Award from a shortlist of 4 papers & 317 accepted papers).
- Pranav Maneriker, Dylan Wood, Pranav Kamra, Yuntian He, Nikhita Vedula, Meghana Bhat, Ethan Kubatko, Desheng Liu, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, "A Comprehensive Web-based Framework for Informing and Improving Hurricane Disaster Response Management." In HurriCon: Science at the Intersection of Hurricanes and the Populated Coast, 2020.
- Nedim Lipka and Nikhita Vedula. "Utilizing Recurrent Neural Networks to Recognize and Extract Open Intent from Text Inputs." Patent filed with Adobe Systems Inc. 2019.
- Pranav Maneriker, Nikhita Vedula, Hussein Al-Olimat, Jiayong Liang, Omar El-Khoury, Ethan Kubatko, Desheng Liu, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Valerie Shalin, Amit Sheth and Srinivasan Parthasarathy. "A Pipeline for Disaster Response and Relief Coordination." In Proceedings of the ACM SIG Conference on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2019.
- Nikhita Vedula, Pranav Maneriker and Srinivasan Parthasarathy. "BOLT-K: Bootstrapping Ontology Learning via Transfer of Knowledge." In Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), 2019.
- Hemant Purohit, Nikhita Vedula, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan and Srinivasan Parthasarathy. "Modeling Transportation Uncertainty in Matching Help Seekers and Suppliers during Disasters." InTI Workshop at SIGIR, 2018.
- Nikhita Vedula, Patrick K. Nicholson, Deepak Ajwani, Sourav Dutta, Alessandra Sala and Srinivasan Parthasarathy. "Enriching Taxonomies with Functional Domain Knowledge." In Proceedings of the ACM SIG Conference on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2018.
- Nikhita Vedula, Wei Sun, Hyunhwan Lee, Harsh Gupta, Mitsunori Ogihara, Joseph Johnson, Gang Ren and Srinivasan Parthasarathy. "Multimodal Content Analysis for Effective Advertisements on YouTube." In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), 2017.
- Nikhita Vedula and Srinivasan Parthasarathy. "Emotional and Linguistic Cues of Depression from Social Media." In Proceedings of the ACM Digital Health Conference (DH), 2017.
- Nikhita Vedula, Srinivasan Parthasarathy and Valerie Shalin. "Predicting Trust Relations in Social Networks: A Case Study on Emergency Response." In Proceedings of the ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci), Troy, NY, June 2017.
- Nikhita Vedula, Srinivasan Parthasarathy and Valerie Shalin. "Predicting Trust Relations Among Users in a Social Network: The Role of Influence, Cohesion and Valence." WISDOM workshop at SIGKDD, 2016.
Experience
- 05/2019 - 08/2019: Summer intern at Amazon Alexa NLU, Boston, MA.
- 05/2018 - 08/2018: Summer intern at Adobe Research, San Jose, CA.
- 05/2017 - 08/2017: Summer intern at Nokia Bell Labs, Dublin, Ireland.
- 05/2013 - 07/2013: Undergraduate research intern at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay.
Awards
- Outstanding Paper Award at The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Conference, i.e., in the top 2% of 1074 accepted papers, 2023.
- Best Paper Honorable Mention at The Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) Conference from a shortlist of 5 papers & 112 accepted papers, 2021.
- Best Paper Award at The Web Conference from a shortlist of 4 papers & 317 accepted papers, 2020.
- CSE Graduate Student Poster (Honorable Mention) at the Ohio State University, 2020.
- Awarded the B. Chandrasekaran & Sandra Mamrak Graduate Research Award in CSE at the Ohio State University, 2020.
- CSE Graduate Student Poster (Honorable Mention) at the Ohio State University, 2020.
- Awarded the prestigious Presidential Fellowship at the Ohio State University, 2019.
- Selected as a Rising Star in EECS, 2019.
- Travel Awards for SIGIR 2018, ICWSM 2018, ACM CRA-W workshop 2017.
- Graduate Student Fellowship at the Ohio State University, 2015.
- Academic Excellence Award, Institute Silver Medal (First Rank in CSE Dept.) and Outstanding Academic Performance Prize, National Institute of Technology, Nagpur (India)
Service
- Program Committee (Conference, 2020-2023): EMNLP, KDD, CIKM, WSDM, SIGIR, CSCW, SIGMOD.
- Program Committee (Workshop): AffCon@AAAI 2018-2021, epiDAMIK@SIGKDD 2018, KiML@SIGKDD 2020-2021, W-NUT@EMNLP 2020, CySoC@ICWSM 2021-22
- Reviewer (Journal, 2020-2022): DAMI
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