Rajkumar Pujari
Graduate Student
Graduate Research Assistant
Joined department: Fall 2017
Education
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. Currently, I am actively looking for full-time NLP research positions in the industry. I work under the guidance of Prof. Dan Goldwasser. My Ph.D. thesis is about conceptualizing and building systems for contextualized pragmatic language understanding.
Specifically, I worked on frameworks for wholistic political text contextualization and cultural context grounding for conversations. I have also worked on building and benchmarking challenging evaluation datasets for contextualized political text understanding. From a technical standpoint, I worked extensively with transformer-based models, fine-tuning LLMs, large graphs, and neural architecture design. I have also spent significant time designing, collecting, and curating interesting CSS datasets for pragmatic language understanding. I am currently working on DARPA CCU program.
I interned at Microsoft Research Redmond in 2021 and Amazon Alexa Seattle in 2019. At MSR, I worked with Elnaz Nouri, Erik Oveson and Priyanka Kulkarni on building a Reinforcement Learning Guided Multi-Task Framework for Low-Resource Stereotype Detection. Our work was published as a long paper at ACL 2022. At Amazon, I worked under Kevin Small. We worked on a sports conversational multi-turn question-answering dataset.