My current research focuses on LLM collaboration, evaluation, and agentic reasoning. I also conduct empirical, mixed-methods research in human-AI interaction and enjoy publishing at both AI and HCI venues that bridge the two communities.

Publications

Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning

nlp-bea18-thumbnail.png Lexical complexity-driven representation learning
(Master’s Thesis, Aug 2022)
Nikhil Wani
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
[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
ICON 2017. In 15th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, 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}
}

† = Equal contribution

Human-Computer Interaction, Human-AI Interaction

EA@CHI24

Which and how many LLMs do you Trust? Understanding Human-AI decision-making under uncertainty
Nikhil Wani
CHI 2025, Case Study Track [Conditionally Accepted]
[reviews]

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

Pre-Prints / Work-In-Progress / Technical Reports

WIP

Large Language Models as Thought Partners: Implications for AI Safety interventions
Nikhil Wani
CSCW 2024 Oct cycle [In Review]
[pdf] [bib]


Program Committee / Reviewer / Academic Services

Research Implementation

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