Modeling knowledge and functional intent for context-aware pragmatic analysis

Abstract

Nikhita Vedula is an Applied Scientist at Amazon Alexa Science. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the Ohio State University in August 2020, advised by Professor Srinivasan Parthasarathy. She received her bachelor's degree from the National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India in 2015. Her research interests are at the intersection of data mining, natural language processing and social computing. Over the course of her PhD, her research involved designing efficient and novel machine learning and computational linguistic techniques that extract, interpret and transform the vast, unstructured digital content into structured knowledge representations in diverse contexts. She has worked with researchers from interdisciplinary fields such as emergency response, marketing, sociology and psychology. She performed research internships at Nokia Bell Laboratories, Adobe Research and Amazon Alexa AI. Her work has been published at several top data mining conferences such as the Web Conference, SIGIR, WSDM and ICDM. Her work on detecting user intentions from their natural language interactions won the Best paper award at the Web Conference 2020. She was a recipient of a Graduate Research Award (2020), a Presidential Fellowship (2019) and a University Graduate Fellowship (2015) at the Ohio State University. She was also selected as a Rising Star in EECS (2019).