Short Bio
I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta/Amii working under the supervision of Osmar Zaiane where I focus on developing data-driven approaches for computational natural language understanding, primarily in the context of enabling machines to converse with humans in natural language. My main goals consist in innovating models and creating resources that encourage acquiring trustworthy linguistic abilities as efficiently as humans.
I was fortunate enough to intern with brilliant researchers in this field. I have worked with Siva Reddy and Edoardo M. Ponti at Mila/McGill, with Hannah Rashkin, Tal Linzen, David Reitter, Diyi Yang, Eva Schlinger and Tom Kwiatkowski at Google Research NYC and with Alessandro Sordoni, Hannes Schulz, Shikhar Sharma and Goeff Gordon at Microsoft Research Montreal.
News
- May 2022: Our work “Evaluating Attribution in Dialogue Systems: The BEGIN Benchmark” got accepted at TACL 2022.
- Apr 2022: New Benchmark FaithDial for building faithful information-seeking dialogue systems. [Preprint] [Data] [Code] [Project Page]
- Apr 2022: Our work “On the Origin of Hallucination in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models?” got accepted at NAACL 2022. [Paper] [Data].
- Jan 2022: Joined Google Research as a student researcher.
- Aug 2021: Our work “Neural Path Hunter: Reducing Hallucination in Dialogue Systems via Path Grounding” got accepted at EMNLP 2021. [Paper] [Code].
- May 2021: Joined Mila as a visiting researcher to work with Siva Reddy.
- May 2021: Our work “Decomposed Mutual Information Estimation for Contrastive Representation Learning” got accepted at ICML 2021 [Paper].
- Apr 2021: Passed my PhD candidacy successfully!
- Apr 2021: New Benchmark BEGIN about evaluating groundedness in dialogue systems. [Preprint] [Data]
- Mar 2021: Invited talk at DSC Women in Tech Conference about inspiring females to pursue a career in STEM [Video].
- Sept 2020: Invited talk at Montreal NLP Meetups about conversational AI.
- Jun 2020: Interned at Google Research Language team NYC under Tal Linzen and David Reitter.
- Dec 2019: Invited talk at DeepMind Montreal about evaluating consistency in dialogue systems.
- Sept 2019: Interned at Microsoft Research Montreal
- Sept 2019: Invited talk at Rasa Developer Summit [Slides] [Video]
- May 2019: Interned at Google Research Language team NYC.
- May 2019: Our work “Augmenting Neural Response Generation with Context-Aware Topical Attention” got accepted at ACL workshop NLP4ConvAI [Paper] [Code].
- Mar 2019: Invited to the Amazon Graduate Research Symposium among top student researchers across North America to present my work in Seattle.
- Feb 2019: Our paper “Evaluating Coherence in Dialogue Systems using Entailment” got accepted at NAACL 2019 [Paper][Code].
- Dec 2018: Presented a poster “Response Generation For Open-Ended Conversational Agent” at NeurIPS Workshop on Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Montreal, Canada.
- Oct 2018: Check out my interview with l’Express about my studies at the University of Alberta.
- Sep 2018: Attended the Grace Hopper Celebration 2018 at Houston, Texas.
- Jan 2018: Our work “Automatic Dialogue Generation with Expressed Emotions” got accepted at NAACL 2018 . [Paper] [Code].