I’m broadly interested in Generative AI and its applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). My current research areas include: LLM explainability, evaluation, and security.

Publications:

Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning:

nlp-bea18-thumbnail.png Lexical complexity-driven representation learning
(Master’s Thesis, Aug 2022)
Nikhil Wani and Sathyanaraya Raghavachary
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
[pdf]

temp.png The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts: Towards the Effectiveness of Voting Ensemble Classifiers for Complex Word Identification
(NAACL 2018 Shared Task)
Nikhil Wani, Sandeep Mathias, Jayashree Aanad Gajam, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
NLP-BEA@ NAACL 2018, New Orleans, USA
[pdf]

@inproceedings{wani2018whole,
title={The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts: Towards the Effectiveness of Voting Ensemble Classifiers for Complex Word Identification},
author={Wani, Nikhil and Mathias, Sandeep and Gajjam, Jayashree Aanand and Bhattacharyya, Pushpak},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications},
pages={200--205},
year={2018}
}

nlp-bea18-thumbnail.png

Is your Statement Purposeless? Predicting Computer Science Graduate Admission Acceptance based on Statement Of Purpose
†Diptesh Kanojia, †Nikhil Wani, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
In 15th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON 2017), Kolkata, India
[pdf]

@InProceedings{kanojia-wani-bhattacharyya:2017:W17-75,
author = {Kanojia, Diptesh and Wani, Nikhil and Bhattacharyya, Pushpak},
title = {Is your Statement Purposeless? Predicting Computer Science Graduation Admission Acceptance based on Statement Of Purpose},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON-2017)},
month = {December},
year = {2017},
address = {Kolkata, India},
publisher = {NLP Association of India},
pages = {141--145},
url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W17/W17-7518}
}

Human Computer Interaction, Machine Learning:

interact-2017

Probabilistic Modeling of Swarachakra Mobile Keyboard for Improved Touch Accuracy
Nikhil Wani, Sumit Singh Yadav, Anirudha Joshi
In the Adjunct Proceedings of 16th IFIP International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT 2017), Mumbai, India
[pdf] [bib]

† = Equal contribution

Program Committee / Reviewer / Academic Services:

  • Reviewer:

  • Student Volunteer: INTERACT 2017, IndiaHCI 2016

  • Teaching:
    • University of Southern California
      • Graduate courses:
      • CSCI 570: Analysis of Algorithms
        • Course Producer (Fall 2020, Summer 2021): Prof. Shahriar Shamsian and Prof. Victor Adamchik.
      • CSCI 567: Machine Learning
        • Course Producer (Summer 2021): Prof. Victor Adamchik
      • CSCI 585: Database systems
        • Grader (Spring 2021) : Prof. Saty Raghavachar
      • CSCI 571: Web Technologies
        • Head TA (Fall 21, Spring 22, and Summer 22): Prof. Marco Papa

Research Implementation:

  • NLP Tasks:
    • Refer to my recent Pytorch + HuggingFace implementation demos page [In-progress].