Rajkumar Pujari
Graduate Student
Graduate Research Assistant
Joined department: Fall 2017
Education
I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at Purdue University. I work under the direction of Prof. Dan Goldwasser. I worked on Machine Comprehension for a while before switching to working on better representations for political events and entities via discourse contextualization. I started working on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in 2013 and have been involved in various projects since, with a year and a half away from NLP research in 2014-15.
I interned at Microsoft Research, Redmond in 2021 summer. I worked with Elnaz Nouri, Erik Oveson and Priyanka Kulkarni on building a Reinforcement Learning Guided Multi-Task Framework for Low-Resource Stereotype Detection. A long paper related to this work have been accepted to ACL 2022.
I spent the summer of 2019 in Seattle as an Applied Scientist Intern in the Alexa Search team working under the guidance of smart and cheerful Kevin Small. We worked on a sports conversational multi-turn question answering dataset. We are working sporadically towards finishing our work from then and turn it into a useful publication for the community.
Prior to 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 in 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.
Selected Publications
Rajkumar Pujari, and Dan Goldwasser, "Understanding Politics via Contextualized Discourse Processing". arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.15784 (2020).
Rajkumar Pujari and Dan Goldwasser, "Using Natural Language Relations between Answer Choices for Machine Comprehension". In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pp. 4010-4015. 2019.
Deepak Gupta, Rajkumar Pujari, Asif Ekbal, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Anutosh Maitra, Tom Jain, and Shubhashis Sengupta. "Can taxonomy help? Improving semantic question matching using question taxonomy". In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 499-513. 2018.
Rajkumar Pujari, Swara Desai, Niloy Ganguly, and Pawan Goyal. "A novel two-stage framework for extracting opinionated sentences from news articles". In Proceedings of TextGraphs-9: the workshop on Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing, pp. 25-33. 2014.
Anutosh Maitra, Shubhashis Sengupta, G. E. O. Tom, Sanjay Podder, Rajkumar Pujari, Deepak Gupta, Asif Ekbal, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. "Utilizing deep learning with an information retrieval mechanism to provide question answering in restricted domains". U.S. Patent Application 15/988,911, filed November 29, 2018.