Resume

Academic & Professional Background

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Highlights

Professional Experience

Senior ML Research Scientist Sep 2016 - Oct 2018
R&D Manager Oct 2018 - Oct 2022
Staff ML Research Scientist Oct 2022 - present
Apple, Cupertino, CA
  • Lead the prototyping and development of applications natural language interactions, code generation and UI navigation, leveraging LLMs and modern ML.
  • Investigated Web-based knowledge graph expansion of Siri's internal facts for QA over knowledge domains.
  • Lead a team of applied researchers to build voice-driven query understanding models for on-device deployment (model compression, model development).
  • Prototyped methods for scaling natural language understanding in Siri to over 20 worldwide languages.
  • Developed scalable models for knowledge-graph question answering in Siri, with international scale-up across supported locales.
Post-Doctoral Researcher Oct 2009 - Feb 2012
Senior Software Engineer Feb 2012 - Nov 2014
Research Staff Member Nov 2014 - Aug 2016
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
  • Developed answer scoring and question analysis components for IBM Watson -- a ground-breaking question answering system that defeated grand champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a nationally televised challenge on the TV game show Jeopardy! [in JNLE, IBM Journal of R&D, CIKM '12, EMNLP '11, CIKM '11]
  • Researched "scenario-based" question answering in the medical domain with IBM Watson, through inference "chaining" over unstructured data. [in AI Magazine '17, IBM Research Report]
  • Conducted research in question answering on electronic health records. [in ACL '16, and podium abstract in AMIA-CRI '16]
  • Built event-focused information extraction for automatic "machine reading" and reasoning for complex Q&A over text documents (DARPA funded). [in EACL '12 and COLING '10]
Summer Research Intern May 2007 - Aug 2007
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
  • Conducted research on automatic speech recognition models, through an analysis of errors in recognizing Keywords and reducing Word Error Rate. [in Interspeech '08]
Research Assistant Aug 2003 - Oct 2009
School of Computing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
  • Conducted research on probabilistic event-focused IE, using SVM and CRFs with textual features in event descriptions. [in EMNLP '09]
  • Designed and implemented two-phase SVM-based model for event information extraction from text through text-based features. [in EMNLP-CoNLL '07]
  • Developed an approach for greater coverage of text-based IE with new lexico-syntactic pattern-based approaches. [in ACL '06 workshop]
  • Implemented a hierarchical structure (feature subsumption) for selecting the best ML features in opinion detection in text. [in EMNLP '06]
  • Designed and implemented algorithms (WordNet::Similarity) for automatic measurement of the semantic similarity and relatedness of English words and concepts. [system demo at NAACL '04 and AAAI '04]
  • Created and open-sourced system (WordNet::SenseRelate) for disambiguating the intended meaning of any given word from its context, using the notion of semantic relatedness of concepts. [system demo at ACL '05 and AAAI '05]
Summer Research Intern May 2003 - Aug 2003
Division of Biomedical Informatics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN
  • Adapted WordNet-based approaches for measuring semantic similarity to applications in the biomedical domain; built open source modules Snomed::Interface, Semantic::Similarity and UMLS::Similarity for the biomed domain. [in JBI]

Education

PhD, Computer Science May 2010
University of Utah
MS, Computer Science Aug 2003
University of Minnesota
BE, Computer Engineering May 2001
University of Pune

Professional Service & Awards

Awards
  • Outstanding Technical Contribution Award, IBM Watson Group (2014)
  • AAAI Feigenbaum Prize (to the IBM Watson team), the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2013)
Area Chair
  • ACL '26 '25 '24 '21 '19, EMNLP '25 '24, NAACL '25 '24, EACL '24, AACL '22, NAACL Industry Track '22, COLING '14
Senior Program Committee
  • AAAI '26 '25 '24 '23 '22 '21, IJCAI '16
Publications Chair
  • EMNLP '17 '16
Advisory Boards
  • DropThought Inc. (2011 - 2016)
  • Scientific Advisory Board, NIST TAC-KBP 2020
Program Committee
  • EMNLP Industry Track '25, COLM '24, EMNLP '23 '22 '21 '20 '19 '18 '17 '15 '14 '11 '10, BlackboxNLP Workshop '23 '21, ACL '23 '22 '20 '18 '17 '16 '14 '13 '12 '08, COLING '22 '20 '18 '16 '12 '10, NAACL '22 '21 '19 '18 '16 '15, IJCAI '20 '19 '16 '13, WeCNLP '19, AAAI '19 '17, IJCAI-ECAI '18, EACL '17 '14, AMIA CRI '16, *SEM '16 '15, ACL-IJCNLP '15, LREC '14, SIGIR Workshop on Semantic Matching in Information Retrieval '14, NAACL-HLT '13 '12 '10, EMNLP-CoNLL '12, RANLP Workshop on Information Extraction and Knowledge Acquisition '11, ACL-HLT '11
Reviewer
  • Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems '25, Computational Linguistics '23, '22, '21, '20, Natural Language Engineering '23, '18, '15, '13, Computer Speech & Language '22, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics '21, '20, '19, '18, '17, '16, '15, '14, '13, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing '17, '16, Artificial Intelligence '15, Language Resources and Evaluation '12, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery '11, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research '09, NESCAI '08, '07
Auxiliary Reviewer
  • AAAI '16 '06, CIKM '14
Session Chair
  • EMNLP '24, ACL '22 '19, CIKM '12, ACL Workshop on IE Beyond the Document '06
Other
  • Mentor, AI Generator '21, AI@MIT
  • Graduate Student Advisory Committee, School of Computing, University of Utah (2004)
  • Most Outstanding Teaching Assistant, University of Minnesota Duluth, MN (2003)
  • National Talent Search Scholarship, National Council for Educational Research & Training, India (1995 - 2001)

Patents

Entailment Knowledge Base in Natural Language Processing Systems
B. Boguraev, J. Chu-Carroll, A. Kalyanpur, D. McClosky, J. W. Murdock and S. Patwardhan
US Patent 11,520,813 B2 and US Patent 11,720,611 B2, Aug 2023
Adaptable Processing Components
Y. Park and S. Patwardhan
US Patent 11,144,718 B2, October 2021
Tone Analysis of Legal Documents
H. Badenes, R. Mannan and S. Patwardhan
US Patent 10,452,780, and US Patent 10,929,615, February 2021
Processing Context-based Inquiries for Knowledge Retrieval
S. Bagchi, K. Barker, B. Boguraev, M. Bornea, A. Faulkner, Y. Li, S. Patwardhan, and S. Rosenthal
US Patent 10,769,138, September 2020
Self-Training of Question Answering System using Question Profiles
M. Devarakonda, S. Patwardhan and P. Raghavan
US Patent 10,699,215, June 2020
Generating Secondary Questions in an Introspective Question Answering System
B. Boguraev, D. Buchanan, J. Chu-Carroll, D. Ferrucci, A. Kalyanpur, J. W. Murdock, and S. Patwardhan
US Patent 10,621,880, US Patent 10,614,725, April 2020
Annotation of Legal Documents with Case Citations
H. Badenes, R. Mannan and S. Patwardhan
US Patent 10,373,278, August 2019
Automated Timeline Completion Using Event Progression Knowledge Base
M. Devarakonda, S. Patwardhan and P. Raghavan
US Patent 10,372,822, August 2019
Robust and Readily Domain-Adaptable Natural Language Interface to Databases
B. Boguraev, E. Khorasani, V. Sheinin, S. Patwardhan and P. Zerfos
US Patent 10,042,921 B2, August 2018
Natural Language Interface to Databases
B. Boguraev, E. Khorasani, V. Sheinin, S. Patwardhan and P. Zerfos
US Patent 9,959,311 B2, May 2018
Natural Language Interface to Databases
B. Boguraev, E. Khorasani, V. Sheinin, S. Patwardhan and P. Zerfos
WO Patent WO/2017/046729, March 2017
Collaborative Creation of Annotated Training Data
S. Berajawala, A. Levas, S. Patwardhan, and D. Taieb
US Patent 9,860,308 B2, January 2018
Fact Checking Using and Aiding Probabilistic Question Answering
D. Ferrucci, D. Gondek, A. Kalyanpur, A. Lally, and S. Patwardhan
US Patent 8,972,321 B2 and US Patent 8,959,043 B2, February 2015
Adaptable Processing Components
Y. Park and S. Patwardhan
WO Patent Application WO/2018/158626, filed December 2017
Patent Pending
Identification of Related Electronic Medical Record Documents in a Question and Answer System
M. Devarakonda, J. Liang, S. Patwardhan and P. Raghavan
US Patent Application 15/336,261, filed October 2016
Patent Pending

Invited Presentations & Panels

Discussion Panel on IE/IR Feb 2021
Invited Panelist, TAC-KBP 2020 Workshop
Semantic Technologies for Automatic Question Answering Jul 2016
Visiting Professor, ECI 2016 Winter School, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Watson: From Jeopardy! to Medicine Jul 2016
Invited Talk, IBM, Argentina
Cognitive Computing: Question Answering Technologies Behind Watson Mar 2015
Guest Instructor, IBM Online Course, IBM Watson Academy, IBM, Armonk NY
Case Study on IBM Watson Nov 2015
Invited Guest Commentator, MBA Course: "Technology and Operations Management", Harvard Business School, Boston MA
UIMA in IBM Watson Oct 2015
Guest Lecturer, Computer Science Course: "Semantic Technologies in IBM Watson", Columbia University, New York NY
Building Applications with Watson Experience Manager Oct 2014
Guest Lecturer, Computer Science Course: "Natural Language Processing with Watson", Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Building IBM's Watson: Technical Insights into the Jeopardy-winning DeepQA Technology Sept 2014
Invited Speaker, First Workshop on Cognitive Systems and Watson, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Jeopardy! "Special" Questions: Exploring the Boundaries of Watson March 2014
Guest Lecturer, Computer Science Course: "Natural Language Processing with Watson", Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Watson Beyond Jeopardy: Adaptation to the Medical Domain March 2014
Invited Speaker, Computer Science Colloquium, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
UIMA in IBM Watson March 2014
Guest Lecturer, Computer Science Course: "Semantic Technologies in IBM Watson", Columbia University, New York NY
UIMA in IBM Watson March 2013
Guest Lecturer, Computer Science Course: "Semantic Technologies in IBM Watson", Columbia University, New York NY
Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project for the Jeopardy! Challenge Feb 2012
Invited Speaker, Computer Science Colloquium, University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT
Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project for the Jeopardy! Challenge Oct 2011
Invited Speaker, External Speaker Series, Knight Capital Group, Jersey City NJ

Teaching

Visiting Professor, Semantic Technologies for Automatic Question Answering Jul 2016
ECI 2016 Winter School, University of Buenos Aires
Instructor, 'Teach the Teacher' Course Jul 2016
IBM, Argentina
Guest Instructor, Cognitive Computing: Question Answering Technologies Behind Watson Mar 2015
IBM Online Course: http://ibm.com/watsonacademy
Teaching Assistant, Machine Learning Fall 2003
School of Computing, University of Utah
Teaching Assistant, Operating Systems Practicum Spring 2003
Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota Duluth
Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Natural Language Processing Fall 2002
Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota Duluth
Teaching Assistant, Computer Science II Spring 2002
Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota Duluth
Teaching Assistant, Computer Science I Fall 2001
Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota Duluth

Selected Publications

EELBERT: Tiny Models through Dynamic Embeddings
G. Cohn, R. Agarwal, D. Gupta and S. Patwardhan
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Industry Track, Singapore, December 2023
Languages You Know Influence those You Learn: Impact of Language Characteristics on Multi-Lingual Text-to-Text Transfer
B. Muller, D. Gupta, J. P. Fauconnier, S. Patwardhan, D. Vandyke, and S. Agarwal
Transfer Learning for Natural Language Processing Workshop (NeurIPS 2023), New Orleans, LA, December 2023
Can Open Domain Question Answering Systems Answer Visual Knowledge Questions?
J. Zhang, A. Mishra, S. Patwardhan, and S. Agarwal
Preprint arXiv:2202.04306, February 2022
Model Stability with Continuous Data Updates
H. Liu, S. Patwardhan, P. Grasch, and S. Agarwal
Preprint arXiv:2201.05692, January 2022
Addressing Limited Data for Textual Entailment across Domains
C. Shivade, P. Raghavan, and S. Patwardhan
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Berlin, Germany, August 2016
[acceptance rate 28%]
The Role of Context Types and Dimensionality in Learning Word Embeddings
O. Melamud, D. McClosky, S. Patwardhan, and M. Bansal
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technology, San Diego, CA, June 2016
[acceptance rate 25%]
Question Answering on Electronic Medical Records
P. Raghavan and S. Patwardhan
Podium Abstract Presentations at AMIA 2016 Summit on Clinical Research Informatics, San Francisco, CA, March 2016
Annotating Electronic Medical Records for Question Answering
P. Raghavan, S. Patwardhan, J. J. Liang, and M. V. Devarakonda
Preprint arXiv: 1805.06816, May 2018
WatsonPaths: Scenario-based Question Answering and Inference over Unstructured Information
A. Lally, S. Bagchi, M. A. Barborak, D. W. Buchanan, J. Chu-Carroll, D. Ferrucci, M. Glass, A. Kalyanpur, E. Mueller, J. W. Murdock, S. Patwardhan, J. Prager, C. Welty
AI Magazine, July 2017
Parallel and Nested Decomposition for Factoid Questions
B. Boguraev, S. Patwardhan, A. Kalyanpur, J. Chu-Carroll, and A. Lally
Natural Language Engineering, October 2014
WatsonPaths: Scenario-based Question Answering and Inference over Unstructured Information
A. Lally, S. Bagchi, M. Barborak, D. Buchanan, J. Chu-Carroll, D. Ferrucci, M. Glass, A. Kalyanpur, E. Mueller, J. W. Murdock, S. Patwardhan, J. Prager and C. Welty
Research Report RC25489 (WAT1409-048), IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, September 2014
Long-Distance Time-Event Relation Extraction
A. Moschitti, S. Patwardhan, and C. Welty
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Nagoya, Japan, October 2013
[acceptance rate 23%]
Semantic Technologies in IBM Watson
A. Gliozzo, O. Biran, S. Patwardhan, and K. McKeown
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Teaching NLP and CL, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013
Fact-based Question Decomposition in DeepQA
A. Kalyanpur, S. Patwardhan, B. Boguraev, A. Lally, and J. Chu-Carroll
IBM Journal of Research and Development, May/July 2012
Structured Data and Inference in DeepQA
A. Kalyanpur, B. Boguraev, S. Patwardhan, J. W. Murdock, A. Lally, C. Welty, J. Prager, B. Coppola, A. Fokoue-Nkoutche, L. Zhang, Y. Pan, and Z. Qiu
IBM Journal of Research and Development, May/July 2012
Question Analysis: How Watson Reads a Clue
A. Lally, J. Prager, M. McCord, B. Boguraev, S. Patwardhan, J. Fan, P. Fodor, and J. Chu-Carroll
IBM Journal of Research and Development, May/July 2012
Labeling by Landscaping: Classifying Tokens in Context by Pruning and Decorating Trees
S. Patwardhan, B. Boguraev, A. Agarwal, A. Moschitti, and J. Chu-Carroll
CIKM '12: Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Maui, HI, October 2012
[acceptance rate 13%]
Parallel and Nested Decomposition for Factoid Questions
A. Kalyanpur, S. Patwardhan, B. Boguraev, J. Chu-Carroll, and A. Lally
Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Avignon, France, April 2012
[acceptance rate 27%]
When Did that Happen? - Linking Events and Relations to Timestamps
D. Hovy, J. Fan, A. Gliozzo, S. Patwardhan, and C. Welty
Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Avignon, France, April 2012
[acceptance rate 27%]
Fact-based Question Decomposition for Candidate Answer Re-ranking
A. Kalyanpur, S. Patwardhan, B. Boguraev, A. Lally, and J. Chu-Carroll
Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Glasgow, UK, October 2011
[acceptance rate 35%]
Using Syntactic and Semantic Structural Kernels for Classifying Definition Questions in Jeopardy!
A. Moschitti, J. Chu-Carroll, S. Patwardhan, J. Fan, and G. Riccardi
Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Edinburgh, UK, July 2011
[acceptance rate 23%]
Learning to Predict Readability using Diverse Linguistic Features
R. Kate, X. Luo, S. Patwardhan, M. Franz, R. Florian, R. Mooney, S. Roukos, and C. Welty
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Beijing, China, August 2010
[acceptance rate 22%]
Acquiring Paraphrases from Text Corpora
R. Bhagat, E. Hovy, and S. Patwardhan
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Knowledge Capture, Redondo Beach, CA, September 2009
[acceptance rate 26%]
A Unified Model of Phrasal and Sentential Evidence for Information Extraction
S. Patwardhan and E. Riloff
Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Singapore, August 2009
[acceptance rate 34%]
Widening the Field of View of Information Extraction through Sentential Event Recognition
S. Patwardhan
PhD thesis, University of Utah, September 2009
Combining Global Relevance Information with Local Contextual Clues for Event-Oriented Information Extraction
S. Patwardhan
Doctoral Consortium at the Twenty Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Chicago, IL, July 2008
An Empirical Analysis of Word Error Rate and Keyword Error Rate
Y. Park, S. Patwardhan, K. V. Ramanan, and S. C. Gates
Proceedings of Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, Australia, September 2008
Measures of Semantic Similarity and Relatedness in the Biomedical Domain
T. Pedersen, S. Pakhomov, S. Patwardhan, and C. Chute
Journal of Biomedical Informatics, June 2007
Effective Information Extraction with Semantic Affinity Patterns and Relevant Regions
S. Patwardhan and E. Riloff
Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007
[acceptance rate 27%]
UMND1: Unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation Using Contextual Semantic Relatedness
S. Patwardhan, S. Banerjee, and T. Pedersen
Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2007), Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007
Learning Domain-Specific Information Extraction Patterns from the Web
S. Patwardhan and E. Riloff
Proceedings of the Workshop on Information Extraction Beyond the Document, ACL 2006, Sydney, Australia, July 2006
Using WordNet-based Context Vectors to Estimate the Semantic Relatedness of Concepts
S. Patwardhan and T. Pedersen
Proceedings of the EACL 2006 Workshop on Making Sense of Sense, Trento, Italy, April 2006
Feature Subsumption for Opinion Analysis
E. Riloff, S. Patwardhan, and J. Wiebe
Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Sydney, Australia, July 2006
Identifying Sources of Opinions with Conditional Random Fields and Extraction Patterns
Y. Choi, C. Cardie, E. Riloff, and S. Patwardhan
Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Vancouver, Canada, October 2005
[acceptance rate 32%]
OpinionFinder: A System for Subjectivity Analysis
T. Wilson, P. Hoffmann, S. Somasundaran, J. Kessler, J. Wiebe, Y. Choi, C. Cardie, E. Riloff, and S. Patwardhan
Proceedings of HLT/EMNLP 2005 Interactive Demonstrations, Vancouver, Canada, October 2005
SenseRelate::TargetWord — A Generalized Framework for Word Sense Disambiguation
S. Patwardhan, S. Banerjee, and T. Pedersen
Proceedings of the ACL Interactive Poster and Demonstration Sessions, Ann Arbor, MI, June 2005
Maximizing Semantic Relatedness to Perform Word Sense Disambiguation
T. Pedersen, S. Banerjee, and S. Patwardhan
University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute Research Report UMSI 25, 2005
Generative Models for Semantic Role Labeling
C. A. Thompson, S. Patwardhan, and C. Arnold
Proceedings of SENSEVAL-3, the Third International Workshop on the Evaluation of Systems for the Semantic Analysis of Text, Barcelona, Spain, July 2004
WordNet::Similarity — Measuring the Relatedness of Concepts
T. Pedersen, S. Patwardhan, and J. Michelizzi
Demonstration Papers at HLT-NAACL 2004, Boston, MA, May 2004
Using Measures of Semantic Relatedness for Word Sense Disambiguation
S. Patwardhan, S. Banerjee, and T. Pedersen
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, Mexico City, Mexico, February 2003
[acceptance rate 46%]
Incorporating Dictionary and Corpus Information into a Context Vector Measure of Semantic Relatedness
S. Patwardhan
Master's thesis, University of Minnesota, Duluth, August 2003