I am Vasudha Varadarajan, a postdoc researcher at CMU’s Language Technologies Institute working on understanding how social cognition surfaces in large language models, its impact on conversations and cultural sensitivity, and the risks associated with it, especially in downstream applications such as mental health. I am also interested in using insights from NLP and data science techniques (what we call “neo-GOFAI” - modern applications of good old-fashioned AI and statistical techniques) to study social / psychological phenomena. I am also interested in interpretability and explainability of language models, and exploring NLP for low-resource and code-mixed settings. I did my PhD under the mentorship of H. Andrew Schwartz in the State University of New York at Stony Brook. I am fortunate to be mentored by Maarten Sap and Mona Diab at LTI.

If you have similar interests and would like to work together, please feel free to reach out!