Akhila Yerukola

Hi! I am a second-year Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science in the Language Technologies Institute. I am fortunate to be advised by Maarten Sap.

My research focuses on enhancing the reasoning and generation capabilities of language models across various contexts. The term "context" is often overloaded and can encompass local, global, cultural, and environmental factors. My goal is to improve the interaction experience for diverse groups of real-world users with technology.

I have ~2.8 years experience as a Senior Research Engineer at the AI Center in Samsung Research America (SRA), where I was advised by Hongxia Jin. Prior to that, I earned my Masters in Computer Science from Stanford University, where I was part of the Stanford NLP Group under the guidance of Chris Manning. I completed my B.Tech in Computer Science from National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli (NIT Trichy), Tamil Nadu, India.

Email: ayerukol [at] andrew.cmu.edu

News:
[Aug 2023] 2 papers accepted to EMNLP 2023!
[Aug 2022] I joined CMU's LTI to pursue my PhD!
[Aug 2019] I joined Samsung Research America as a Research Engineer!

Publications

2024

Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic. Generative Evaluation of Intent Resolution in LLMs

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024.
Akhila Yerukola, Saujas Vaduguru, Daniel Fried, Maarten Sap
PDF Code

NormAd: A Benchmark for Measuring the Cultural Adaptability of Large Language Models

under submission.
Abhinav Rao∗, Akhila Yerukola∗, Vishwa Shah, Katharina Reinecke, Maarten Sap
* equal contribution
PDF

2023

Don't Take This Out of Context! On the Need for Contextual Models and Evaluations for Stylistic Rewriting

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
Akhila Yerukola, Xuhui Zhou, Elizabeth Clark, Maarten Sap
PDF

Beyond Denouncing Hate: Strategies for Countering Implied Biases and Stereotypes in Language

Findings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
Jimin Mun, Emily Allaway, Akhila Yerukola, Laura Vianna, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Maarten Sap

Cobra frames: Contextual reasoning about effects and harms of offensive statements

Findings of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023.
Xuhui Zhou, Hao Zhu, Akhila Yerukola, Thomas Davidson, Jena D. Hwang, Swabha Swayamdipta, Maarten Sap
PDF

2022

Explainable Slot Type Attentions to Improve Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling

Findings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2022.
Kalpa Gunaratna, Vijay Srinivasan, Akhila Yerukola, Hongxia Jin
PDF

2021

The GEM Benchmark: Natural Language Generation, its Evaluation and Metrics

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Workshop, 2021.
Sebastian Gehrmann, Tosin Adewumi, Karmanya Aggarwal, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Aremu Anuoluwapo, Antoine Bosselut, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Miruna Clinciu, Dipanjan Das, Kaustubh D Dhole, Wanyu Du, Esin Durmus, Ondřej Dušek, Chris Emezue, Varun Gangal, Cristina Garbacea, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Yufang Hou, Yacine Jernite, Harsh Jhamtani, Yangfeng Ji, Shailza Jolly, Dhruv Kumar, Faisal Ladhak, Aman Madaan, Mounica Maddela, Khyati Mahajan, Saad Mahamood, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Pedro Henrique Martins, Angelina McMillan-Major, Simon Mille, Emiel van Miltenburg, Moin Nadeem, Shashi Narayan, Vitaly Nikolaev, Rubungo Andre Niyongabo, Salomey Osei, Ankur Parikh, Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Niranjan Ramesh Rao, Vikas Raunak, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Sashank Santhanam, João Sedoc, Thibault Sellam, Samira Shaikh, Anastasia Shimorina, Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo, Hendrik Strobelt, Nishant Subramani, Wei Xu, Diyi Yang, Akhila Yerukola, Jiawei Zhou
PDF Code Media

Data Augmentation for Voice-Assistant NLU using BERT-based Interchangeable Rephrase

European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2021.
Akhila Yerukola∗, Mason Bretan∗, Hongxia Jin
* equal contribution
PDF

2019

Do Massively Pretrained Language Models Make Better Storytellers?

Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), 2019.
Abigail See, Aneesh Pappu∗, Rohun Saxena∗, Akhila Yerukola∗, Christopher D. Manning
* equal contribution
PDF Code