Aakanksha Naik

Carnegie Mellon University · Pittsburgh, PA 15217 · anaik@cs.cmu.edu

I am a PhD student in the Language Technologies Institute at the School of Computer Science in Carnegie Mellon University. My primary research interests lie in developing better models and evaluation paradigms for the long tail in language understanding, i.e., domains and phenomena that have traditionally received less attention in standard language understanding benchmarks. My current research tackles the task of developing event extractors for medical data, with no in-domain training data. In the past, I have worked on discourse-level temporal event ordering, natural language inference and numerical reasoning. I am lucky to be advised by Prof Carolyn Rose. In the past, I have also worked with Prof Ed Hovy, Prof Graham Neubig, Prof Eric Nyberg, Prof Alan Black and Prof James Antaki on various projects.

Prior to starting my PhD, I received my Masters in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University in August 2018. Before joining CMU, I received my BE (bachelor of engineering) in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani in August 2016. During my undergrad, I had the opportunity to intern with the Machine and Language Learning (MALL) Lab at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Natural Language Dialog group at the Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California.

News:

  • Feb 2022: I will be joining the Semantic Scholar team at AI2 as a research scientist!
  • Feb 2022: I successfully passed my thesis defense! Thanks to my wonderful committee members: Carolyn Rose, Jill Lehman, Emma Strubell, Matt Gormley and Luke Zettlemoyer!
  • Oct 2021: I will be serving as an Academic Inclusion co-chair on the NAACL 2022 DEI committee. Please reach out if there is anything you would like to see addressed!

    Publications

  1. Adapting Event Extractors to Medical Data: Bridging the Covariate Shift
    Aakanksha Naik, Jill Lehman, Carolyn Rose
    [pdf, code]
    2. EACL 2021
  2. Adapting to the Long Tail in Language Understanding
    Aakanksha Naik, Carolyn Rose
    [pdf]
    3. Adapt-NLP workshop, EACL 2021
  3. STAGE: Tool for Automated Extraction of Semantic Time Cues to Enrich Neural Temporal Ordering Models
    Luke Breitfeller, Aakanksha Naik, Carolyn Rose
    [pdf]
    4. Arxiv
  4. FanfictionNLP: A Text Processing Pipeline for Fanfiction
    Michael Yoder, Sopan Khosla, Qinlan Shen, Aakanksha Naik, Huiming Jin, Hariharan Muralidharan, Carolyn Rose
    [pdf]
    5. Workshop on Narrative Understanding, NAACL 2021
  5. Towards Open Domain Event Trigger Identification using Adversarial Domain Adaptation
    Abhilasha Ravichander*, Aakanksha Naik*, Carolyn Rose, Eduard Hovy
    [pdf, code]
    6. ACL 2020
  6. EQUATE: A Benchmark Evaluation Platform for Numerical Reasoning in Natural Language Inference
    Abhilasha Ravichander*, Aakanksha Naik*, Carolyn Rose, Eduard Hovy
    [pdf, code/data]
    7. CoNLL 2019
  7. TDDiscourse: A Dataset for Discourse-Level Temporal Ordering of Events
    Aakanksha Naik, Luke Breitfeller, Carolyn Rose
    [pdf, data]
    8. SIGDIAL 2019
  8. Exploring Numeracy in Word Embeddings
    Aakanksha Naik*, Abhilasha Ravichander*, Carolyn Rose, Eduard Hovy
    [pdf]
    9. ACL 2019
  9. Using Functional Schemas to Understand Social Media Narratives
    Xinru Yan, Aakanksha Naik, Yohan Jo, Carolyn Rose
    [pdf, code/data]
    10. Storytelling Workshop, ACL 2019
  10. Stress Test Evaluation for Natural Language Inference
    Aakanksha Naik*, Abhilasha Ravichander*, Norman Sadeh, Carolyn Rose, Graham Neubig
    Area Chair Favorite Paper [pdf, code/data]
    11. COLING 2018
  11. Extracting Personal Medical Events for User Timeline Construction using Minimal Supervision [pdf]
    Aakanksha Naik, Chris Bogart, Carolyn Rose
    12. BioNLP, ACL 2017
  12. Tackling Biomedical Text Summarization: OAQA at BioASQ 5B [pdf]
    Khyathi Chandu, Aakanksha Naik, Aditya Chandrasekar, Zi Yang, Niloy Gupta, Eric Nyberg
    13. BioNLP, ACL 2017
  13. Factors Affecting Healthcare Engagement by Patients with Severe Heart Failure: An Exploratory Analysis
    Lisa Lohmueller, Aakanksha Naik, Luke Breitfeller, Colleen McIlvennan, Manreet Kanwar, Srinivas Murali, Carolyn Rose, James Antaki
    14. MDM Policy and Practice

Personal

In my free time, I enjoy reading, usually mystery and humour (especially British humour). I also love reading literary classics, short stories and fantasy. Though my list of favourite books keeps fluctuating, if you ask me for recommendations, I will probably suggest some of the following:

  • To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns: Khaled Hosseini
  • The Book Thief: Markus Zusak
  • Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell
  • Little Women: Louisa May Alcott
  • Three Men in A Boat: Jerome K Jerome
  • The Importance of Being Earnest: Oscar Wilde
  • A Damsel in Distress, Big Money: PG Wodehouse
  • The Ransom of Red Chief, Mammon and the Archer, The Last Leaf, Brickdust Row, The Trimmed Lamp: O'Henry
  • The Lottery Ticket, Ward Number 6, The Lady and the Dog: Anton Chekhov
  • Murder on the Orient Express, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Thirteen Problems: Agatha Christie

I often dabble in painting, sketching and calligraphy, which I first picked up during a summer workshop. You can check out some of my art here! I also like cooking and travelling and find both activities relaxing. Though I am not a huge TV enthusiast, I love watching Game of Thrones, The Good Place and Sherlock. I also enjoy listening to podcasts, especially Lore by Aaron Mahnke, which you should check out if you like creepy thrillers!