Dr. Mohit Bansal is the John R. & Louise S. Parker Associate Professor and the Director of the MURGe-Lab (in the UNC-NLP Group) in the Computer Science department at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill. Prior to this, he was a research assistant professor (3-year endowed position) at TTI-Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of California at Berkeley (where he was advised by Dan Klein) and his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 2008. He has also spent time at Google Research, Microsoft Research, and Cornell University.
His research expertise is in statistical natural language processing and machine learning, with a particular focus on multimodal, grounded, and embodied semantics (i.e., language with vision and speech, for robotics), human-like language generation and Q&A/dialogue, and interpretable and generalizable deep learning.
He is a recipient of the 2020 IJCAI Early CAREER Spotlight, 2019 DARPA Director's fellowship, 2019 Google Focused Research Award, 2019 Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, 2019 NSF CAREER Award, 2018 ARO Young Investigator Award (YIP), 2017 DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), 2017 ACL Outstanding Paper Award, 2014 ACL Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, 2018 COLING Area Chair Favorites Paper Award, and 2019 ACL Best Short Paper Nomination. His service includes Program Co-Chair for CoNLL 2019, Senior Area Chair for ACL and EMNLP 2020, Americas Sponsorship Co-Chair for the ACL, and Associate/Action Editor for TACL, Computational Linguistics (CL), IEEE/ACM TASLP, and CSL journals.
Statistical natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on multimodal, grounded, and embodied semantics (i.e., language with vision and speech, for robotics), human-like language generation and Q&A/dialogue, and interpretable and generalizable deep learning.
Our Group's Awards
EACL Best Long Paper Award Honorable Mention, 2021.
UNC Phillip & Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, 2020.
IJCAI Early Career Spotlight, 2020 (previous years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019)
John R. & Louise S. Parker Faculty Fellow/Scholar (Distinguished Asst./Assoc. Professorship), 2020
DARPA Director's Fellowship, 2019
Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, 2019
Amazon Machine Learning Research Award, 2019
NSF-CAREER Award, 2019
Google Focused Research Award, 2019
ACL Best Short Paper Nomination, 2019
Salesforce Research Deep Learning Grant, 2018
Facebook Faculty Research Award, 2018
IBM Faculty Award, 2018
Army Research Office Young Investigator Award (ARO-YIP), 2018
COLING 'Area Chair Favorites' Paper Award, 2018
Adobe Faculty Research Award, 2018
Verisk AI Faculty Research Award, 2018
DARPA Young Faculty Award (DARPA-YFA), 2017
Facebook ParlAI Faculty Research Award, 2017
ACL Outstanding Paper Award, 2017
Google Faculty Research Award, 2016
Best Paper Award, ACL Representation Learning for NLP Workshop, 2016
Bloomberg Data Science Research Grant, 2016
NVidia Paper Award, NIPS Multimodal Machine Learning Workshop, 2015
Google Faculty Research Award, 2014
IBM Faculty Award, 2014
ACL Best Paper Award Honorable Mention (top-5 paper), 2014
Best/Outstanding Reviewer Award, COLING 2018, NAACL 2018, NAACL 2015, EMNLP 2012
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, UC Berkeley, 2011
Tong Leong Lim Pre-Doctoral Prize, EECS, UC Berkeley, 2011
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, 2011
Student Fellowships:
Adobe Research Fellowship, 2021 (Jie Lei)
Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, 2019 (Ramakanth Pasunuru)
Facebook PhD Fellowship Finalist, 2019 (Ramakanth Pasunuru)
Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellowship, 2019 (Hao Tan)
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2018 (Lisa Bauer)
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2019 (Darryl Hannan)
Royster Society Kenan Fellowship, 2019 (Peter Hase)
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Runner-Up, 2020 (Sweta Karlekar)
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Honorable Mention, 2019 (Han Guo)
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Finalist, 2020 (Han Guo
Other Funding/Grants:
NSF Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (UNC Co-PI)
ONR Advancing Artificial Intelligence for the Naval Domain (UNC PI)
DARPA Machine Common Sense (MCS) (UNC PI)
DARPA Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas (KAIROS) (UNC PI)
NSF-NIH SCH AURA Connecting Audio and Radio Sensing Systems to Improve Care at Home (UNC Co-PI)
Teaching
Instructor, COMP590/790: Connecting Language to Vision and Robotics, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2021.
Instructor, COMP786: Natural Language Processing, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2020.
Instructor, First-Year Undergraduate Honors Seminar: Special Topics: Human and Artificial Intelligence Through the Prism of Language, Fall 2019.
Instructor, Advanced Topics in NLP: Recent Progress in Different Learning Paradigms, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2019.
Instructor, Advanced Topics in NLP: Conversational Models, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2018.
Instructor, Graduate Natural Language Processing, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2017.
Instructor, Advanced Topics in NLP: Language Grounding for Robotics, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2017.
Instructor, Seminar on Natural Language Processing, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2016.
Guest Lecturer, Computational Linguistics (Instructor: John Goldsmith), University of Chicago, Spring 2015.
Guest Lecturer, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (Instructor: Matthew Walter), TTI-Chicago, University of Chicago, Spring 2015.
Guest Lecturer, Visual Recognition with Text (Instructor: Sanja Fidler), University of Toronto, Winter 2015 — short course on 'Topics, Trends, and Resources in NLP' [slides].
Grad Student Instructor, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Instructor: Dan Klein), UC Berkeley, Fall 2011. Received an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award by UC Berkeley for excellence in teaching.
Grad Student Instructor, Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence (Instructors: Pieter Abbeel, Dan Klein, Jitendra Malik), UC Berkeley, Spring 2009. Sole TA for new course with 30 advanced students.
Recent Invited Talks/Keynotes:
Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) Workshop, EMNLP 2021 (upcoming)
Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR) Workshop, NAACL 2021 (upcoming)
Person in Context Workshop, CVPR 2021 (upcoming)
VQA Workshop, CVPR 2021 (upcoming)
IJCAI 2020 Early Career Spotlight Talk
Singapore Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SSNLP 2020) ['Towards Knowledge-Robust and Multimodally-Grounded NLP': video]
3rd Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT @ EMNLP 2019) ['Knowledgeable and Multimodal Language Generation': slides]
1st Workshop on Beyond Vision and Language: Integrating Knowledge from Real-World (LANTERN @ EMNLP 2019) ['Knowledgeable and Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Language+Vision+Robotics': slides]
Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering (MRQA @ EMNLP 2019) ['Interpretability and Robustness for Multi-Hop QA': slides]
4th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP @ ACL 2019) ['Knowledgeable and Adversarially-Robust Representation Learning': slides]
RSS-2018 Natural Human-Robot Communication Workshop ['Spatially-Grounded, Personable, and Sensible Human-Robot Communication']
Triangle ML Day
Google Assistant Dialog Workshop
Machine Learning Summer School
SAS-Nvidia Deep Learning Symposium
ML@GeorgiaTech Seminar
Kenan-InfiaML-Rethinc Machine Learning Symposium
UNC Alumni AI Panel
Students/Interns
Student openings:
I am looking for highly motivated PhD students. If you are interested in the broad areas of multimodal NLP (with vision and speech, for robotics), language generation and dialogue/Q&A, and structured+interpretable deep learning, please see my prospective student page and contact me at mbansal-AT-cs-DOT-unc-DOT-edu for further details.
More student info at: MURGe-Lab
UNC Advisees:
Lisa Bauer (UNC, PhD) (NSF Graduate Research Fellow)
Darryl Hannan (UNC, PhD) (NSF Graduate Research Fellow)
Peter Hase (UNC, PhD) (Royster Society PhD Fellow)
Yichen Jiang (UNC, PhD)
Hyounghun Kim (UNC, PhD)
Jie Lei (UNC, PhD; co-advisor: Tamara Berg) (Adobe Research Fellow)
Adyasha Maharana (UNC, PhD)
Yixin Nie (UNC, PhD)
Ramakanth Pasunuru (UNC, PhD) (Microsoft Research PhD Fellow; Facebook PhD Fellowship Finalist)
Swarnadeep Saha (UNC, PhD)
Hao Tan (UNC, PhD) (Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellow)
Shiyue Zhang (UNC, PhD)
Yubo Zhang (UNC, PhD)
Xiang Zhou (UNC, PhD)
Tsion Coulter (UNC, BS)
Han Guo (UNC, BS)
Akshay Jain (UNC, BS)
Sweta Karlekar (UNC, BS)
Antonio Mendoza (UNC, BS)
Songhe Wang (UNC, BS)
Yicheng Wang (UNC, BS)
Past Advisees:
Yen-Chun Chen (UNC, MS) --> Microsoft Research
Tong Niu (Visiting student; Duke, MS) --> Salesforce Research
Licheng Yu (UNC, PhD; advisor = Tamara Berg) (PhD Thesis Committee Member) --> Microsoft Research
Arjun Chandrasekaran (Georgia Tech, PhD; advisor = Devi Parikh) (PhD Thesis Committee Member)
Nitish Joshi (Visiting student; IIT Bombay, BS)
Malika Aubakirova (UChicago, BS)
Dhivya Eswaran (IIT-Madras, BTech --> CMU, PhD)
Rasool Fakoor (UT-Arlington, PhD --> MSR)
Arnab Ghosh (IIT Kanpur, BTech --> Oxford, PhD)
Yuchen He (UIUC, PhD)
Myungin Kim (UChicago, MS)
Zuyao Li (USC, MS --> Google/Nest)
Ang Lu (Tsinghua, BS --> CMU, MS)
Pranava S. Madhyastha (UPC Barcelona, PhD)
Hongyuan Mei (UChicago/TTIC, MS --> JHU, PhD) (MS Thesis Co-Advisor)
Aravind L Srinivas (IIT Madras, BTech --> UC Berkeley, PhD)
Ryan Stout (UIUC, MS)
Trang Tran (UWash, PhD)
Jing Wang (UIC, PhD --> Conversant)
John Wieting (UIUC/TTIC MS --> CMU, PhD)
Zhengyang Wu (GeorgiaTech, BS --> MagicLeap)
Professional Service
Action Editor, TACL Journal
Action Editor, Computational Linguistics (CL) Journal
Associate Editor, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing (TASLP)
Editorial Board, Computer Speech and Language Journal
Americas Sponsorship Co-Chair for the ACL (2020-2023)
Senior Area Chair (Vision, Robotics, Grounding): ACL 2021
Senior Area Chair (Vision, Robotics, Grounding): NAACL 2021
Senior Area Chair: AAAI 2021
Senior Area Chair (Machine Learning): EMNLP 2020
Senior Area Chair (Sentence Semantics): ACL 2020
Program Co-Chair: CoNLL 2019
Senior Program Committee Member: AAAI 2020
Area Chair (Semantics): EMNLP 2019
Area Chair (Summarization): NAACL 2019
Area Chair (Discourse, Dialogue, Summarization, Generation, Multimodal NLP): EMNLP 2018
Tutorial Chair: NAACL 2018
Area Chair (Vision, Robots, and Grounding): ACL 2017
Area Chair (Machine Learning): EMNLP 2017
Demo Chair: ACL 2017
Tutorial Chair: NAACL 2016
Area Chair: NAACL 2016
Program Committee Member / Reviewer:
Conferences: EMNLP (best reviewer award, 2012), NAACL (best reviewer award, 2018, 2015), ACL, NIPS, ICLR, IJCAI, EACL, COLING (outstanding reviewer award, 2018), *SEM, IJCNLP, ICON
Journals: TACL, TPAMI, TALIP
Workshops: ACL Workshop of Women in Natural Language Processing (2017), ACL Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (2017), EACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing (2017), NAACL Multilingual and Crosslingual Methods in NLP (2016), NAACL Human-Computer Question Answering (2016), ACL Evaluating Vector-Space Representations for NLP (2016), NAACL Vector Space Modeling for NLP (2015)
University Research Proposals: ORAU
Organizer: SpLU-RoboNLP Joint Workshop at NAACL 2019, CVPR 2019 Workshop on Conceptual Captions, NLP/ML Colloquium Series at UNC, Language Grounding for Robotics at ACL 2017, Midwest Speech and Language Days 2015
Committee Member: Graduate (PhD) Admissions Committee, EECS, UC Berkeley
Panel Member: National Science Foundation (NSF) Review Panels
Software and Datasets: Available as links with corresponding paper in Publications/Code/Data.
