Shashank Srivastava
I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill
Email: ssrivastava@cs.unc.edu
I do research on natural language processing, with special interests in grounding language in perception, neuro-symbolic methods, and interactive machine learning.
In 2018-19, I was an AI Resident at Microsoft Research in Redmond. Till 2018, I was a graduate student in the Machine Learning Department at CMU. My dissertation research with Tom Mitchell focused on teaching machines new tasks through natural language supervision; and is a thrust towards a new direction of training machine learning models from language-based interactions. I co-organized the first workshop on Learning by Instruction at NeurIPS 2018.
Previously, I worked on models of computational semantics with Ed Hovy and emergence of compositional language in artificial agents with Harish Karnick.
I am generally interested in machine intelligence, language, AI and story-telling.
I graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Once upon a time, I did bad things with other people's money at Tower Research Capital.
I am looking for motivated students at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.
Publications:
Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and Extrapolating the Capabilities of Language Models
A Srivastava and others
CLUES: A Benchmark for Learning Classifiers using Natural Language Explanations
RR Menon, S Ghosh, S Srivastava
ACL 2022
ePiC: Employing Proverbs in Context as a Benchmark for Abstract Language Understanding
S Ghosh, S Srivastava
ACL 2022
Probing Difficulty and Discrimination of Natural Language Questions With Item Response Theory
M Byrd, S Srivastava
ACL 2022
Mapping Language to Programs using Multiple Reward Components with Inverse Reinforcement Learning
S Ghosh, S Srivastava
Findings of EMNLP 2021
Adversarial Scrubbing of Demographic Information for Text Classification
S Chowdhury, S Ghosh, Y Li, J Oliva, S Srivastava , S Chaturvedi
EMNLP 2021
Does Social Pressure Drive Persuasion in Online Fora?
A Jain, S Srivastava
EMNLP 2021
Improving and Simplifying Pattern Exploiting Training
D Tam, RR Menon, M Bansal, S Srivastava, C Raffel
EMNLP 2021
How Helpful is Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Table-to-Text Generation?
S Ghosh, Z Qi, S Chaturvedi, S Srivastava
ACL 2021
PRover: Proof Generation for Interpretable Reasoning over Rules
S Saha, S Ghosh, S Srivastava, M Bansal
EMNLP 2020
Learning Web-based procedures by Reasoning over Explanations and Demonstrations in Context
S Srivastava, A Polozov, N Jojic, C Meek
ACL 2020
An Agent for Learning New Natural Language Commands
A Azaria, S Srivastava, J Krishnamurthy, I Labutov, T Mitchell
JAAMAS 2020
Learning to Ask for Conversational Machine Learning
S Srivastava, I Labutov, T Mitchell
EMNLP 2019
Teaching Machines to Classify from Natural Language Interactions
S Srivastava
PhD Thesis, CMU 2018
A Spatial Model for Extracting and Visualizing Latent Discourse Structure in Text
S Srivastava, N Jojic
ACL 2018
Zero-shot Learning of Classifiers from Natural Language Quantification
S Srivastava, I Labutov, T Mitchell
ACL 2018
LIA: A Natural Language Programmable Personal Assistant
I Labutov, S Srivastava, T Mitchell
EMNLP 2018 (System Demos)
Where have I heard this story before? : Identifying Narrative Similarity in Movie Remakes'
S Chaturvedi, S Srivastava, D Roth
NAACL 2018 (short)
Learning Classifiers from Declarative Language
S Srivastava, I Labutov, T Mitchell
NIPS Workshop on Learning from Limited Data 2017
Joint Concept Learning and Semantic Parsing from Natural Language Explanations
S Srivastava, I Labutov, T Mitchell
EMNLP 2017
Parsing Natural Language Conversations with Contextual Cues
S Srivastava, A Azaria, T Mitchell
IJCAI 2017
Inferring Interpersonal Relations in Narrative Summaries
S Srivastava, S Chaturvedi, T Mitchell
AAAI 2016
Modeling Evolving Relationships Between Characters in Literary Novels
S Chaturvedi, S Srivastava, H Daume, C Dyer
AAAI 2016
CMUML Micro-Reader System for KBP 2016 Cold Start Slot Filling, Event Nugget Detection, and Event Argument Linking
B Yang, N Nakashole, B Kisiel, E Platanios, A Saparov, S Srivastava, D Wijaya, T Mitchell
TAC 2016
CMU-ML System for KBP Cold Start Slot Filling
B Kisiel, B McDowell, M Gardner, N Nakashole, E Platanios, A Saparov, S Srivastava, D Wijaya, T Mitchell
TAC 2015
Vector-space semantics with frequency driven motifs
S Srivastava, E Hovy
ACL 2014
Spatial Compactness meets Topical Consistency: Jointly modeling link and content for community detection
M Sachan, A Dubey, S Srivastava, EP Xing, E Hovy
WSDM 2014
A Semantically Enriched Tree Kernel Over Distributed Word Representations
S Srivastava, D Hovy, E Hovy
EMNLP 2013 (short)
A Structured Distributional Semantic Model for Event Co-reference
K Goyal*, S Jauhar*, H Li*, M Sachan*, S Srivastava*, E Hovy
ACL 2013 (short)
(* equally contributing)
Identifying Metaphorical Word Use with Tree Kernels
D Hovy, S Srivastava, S Jauhar, M Sachan, K Goyal, H Li, E Hovy
NAACL-HLT Meta4NLP Workshop 2013
A Structured Distributional Semantic Model : Integrating Structure with Semantics
K Goyal*, S Jauhar*, H Li*, M Sachan*, S Srivastava*, E Hovy
Workshop on Continuous Vector Space Models and their Compositionality, ACL 2013
A Topical graph-kernel for Link Prediction in Labeled Graphs
S Chaturvedi, H Daume III, T Moon, S Srivastava
ICML Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs (MLG) 2012
Evolution of Compositional Languages in Multiple Agent Social Communities
S Srivastava
MTech Thesis, IIT Kanpur, Sep 2010