Rajkumar Pujari




I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. Currently, I am actively looking for full-time NLP research positions in the industry. I work under the guidance of Prof. Dan Goldwasser. My Ph.D. thesis is about conceptualizing and building systems for contextualized pragmatic language understanding.

Specifically, I worked on frameworks for wholistic political text contextualization and cultural context grounding for conversations. I have also worked on building and benchmarking challenging evaluation datasets for contextualized political text understanding. From a technical standpoint, I worked extensively with transformer-based models, fine-tuning LLMs, large graphs, and neural architecture design. I have also spent significant time designing, collecting, and curating interesting CSS datasets for pragmatic language understanding. I am currently working on DARPA CCU program.

I interned at Microsoft Research Redmond in 2021 and Amazon Alexa Seattle in 2019. At MSR, I worked with Elnaz Nouri, Erik Oveson and Priyanka Kulkarni on building a Reinforcement Learning Guided Multi-Task Framework for Low-Resource Stereotype Detection. Our work was published as a long paper at ACL 2022. At Amazon, I worked under Kevin Small. We worked on a sports conversational multi-turn question-answering dataset.

Before joining Prof. Goldwasser's lab, I worked as a Research Assistant in Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya's CFILT lab at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay back in India. I completed my undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in Computer Science and Technology. I was introduced to NLP by Prof. Niloy Ganguly and Prof. Pawan Goyal during my senior year at IIT Kharagpur.




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