Rupak Sarkar
I am a first year PhD. student at the University of Maryland,
College Park in the department of Computer Science in the amazing CLIP lab
with Prof. Philip Resnik! I work on evaluating topic models that can help domain experts in the
real world and broadly on other topics in Computational Social/Political Science.
Prior to my PhD, I served as a Course Research Engineer in the course 11-865/11-665 Tracking Political Sentiments Using Machine Learning (Fall 2020) at CMU with instructors Dr. Ashiqur Khudabukhsh, Prof. Tom Mitchell and Prof. Mark Kamlet.
My main research interests lie in understanding public opinion from user generated text. Here's a brief roadmap of my existing research. My previous research mentor and frequent collaborator is Prof. Ashiqur R KhudaBukhsh.
Mailto : rupak@umd.edu, rupaksarkar.cs@gmail.com
Recent updates
- 2022: I have joined the Document Intelligence Lab of Adobe Research as a Research Scientist Intern for the Summer of 2022! I'll be working on using NLP on conceptual understanding of documents.
- 2022: Our paper on dynamics of US News Viewership on the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential Election leading up to the January 6 riots was published in ACM WebScience 2022.
- 2021: Our student abstract submission for AAAI-2021 titled "Are Chess Discussions Racist? An Adversarial Hate Speech Dataset" won the Best AAAI-21 Student Abstract 3-Minute Presentation award out of 400+ submissions. [Link to presentation]
Publications
- Fringe News Networks: Dynamics of US News Viewership following the 2020 Presidential Election. A. R. KhudaBukhsh*, Rupak Sarkar*, Mark S. Kamlet, Tom M. Mitchell 14th ACM Web Science Conference, (WebSci) 2022
- Empathy and Hope: Resource Transfer to Model Inter-country Social Media Dynamics Clay H.Yoo, Shriphani Palakodety, Rupak Sarkar, Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh 1st Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact NLP4PI, ACL 2021.
- We Don't Speak the Same Language: Interpreting Polarization Through Machine Translation. A. R. KhudaBukhsh*, Rupak Sarkar*, Mark S. Kamlet, Tom M. Mitchell 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021. [slides]
- Social Media Attributions in the Context of Water Crisis. Rupak Sarkar*, Sayantan Mahinder*, Hirak Sarkar, A. R. KhudaBukhsh IJCAI 2020 AI for Social Good Workshop.
- Are chess discussions racist? An Adversarial Hate Speech Data Set (Student Abstract). Rupak Sarkar, A. R. KhudaBukhsh 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021 (SA-21) [poster]
- Social Media Attributions in the Context of Water Crisis. Rupak Sarkar*, Sayantan Mahinder*, Hirak Sarkar, A. R. KhudaBukhsh Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2020 [22.4% Acceptance Rate]
- The Non-native Speaker Aspect: Indian English in Social Media. Rupak Sarkar, Sayantan Mahinder, A. R. KhudaBukhsh 6th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT), EMNLP 2020 [slides]
Selected Media Coverage
- The Science of Political Polarization. [CMU CS Magazine Cover Story]
- Why a YouTube Chat About Chess Got Flagged for Hate Speech.[Wired]
- AI May Mistake Chess Discussions as Racist Talk.[CMU Press Release]
- Even our language is polarized.[CMU Press Release]
- The Left and the Right Speak Different Languages - Literally.[Wired]
- Mask Vs. Muzzle: Even Words Are Now Polarized.[Futurity]
- Fox News viewers write about 'BLM' the same way CNN viewers write about 'KKK'.[The Conversation], [Yahoo News]