[PDF Version]

About me

Hi, my name is Bishal Santra. I am a Prime Minister Research Fellow (PhD) at IIT Kharagpur, India. My main area of interest is Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Right now, I am working on research projects on Dialogue Systems, Chatbots and applications of Knowledge Graphs.

Research Interests

Dialogue Systems, Knowledge Graphs, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning

Publications

[Google Scholar], * Equal Contributions

Arxiv 2023

Bishal Santra, Ravi Ghadia, Arpit Dwivedi, Manish Gupta, Pawan Goyal. CORAL: Contextual Response Retrievability Loss Function for Training Dialog Generation Models On Arxiv. [PDF]

EMNLP 2023

Bishal Santra, Sakya Basak, Abhinandan De, Manish Gupta, Pawan Goyal. Frugal Prompting for Dialog Models [PDF]

NAACL 2022

Bishal Santra, Sumegh Roychowdhury, Aishik Mandal, Vasu Gurram, Atharva Naik, Manish Gupta, Pawan Goyal. Representation Learning for Conversational Data using Discourse Mutual Information Maximization. NAACL 2022 (Long Paper) [PDF]

NAACL 2021

Bishal Santra*, Potnuru Anusha*, Pawan Goyal. Hierarchical Transformer for Task Oriented Dialog Systems. NAACL 2021 (Long Paper) [PDF, Supplementary PDF]

Computational Linguistics (2021)

Amrith Krishna, Bishal Santra, Ashim Gupta, Pavankumar Satuluri and Pawan Goyal. A Graph Based Framework for Structured Prediction Tasks in Sanskrit. Computational Linguistics Vol. 46, No. 4, December 2020. [PDF]

Arxiv Preprint 2020

Bishal Santra, Prakhar Sharma, Sumegh Roychowdhury, Pawan Goyal. Exploring Effects of Random Walk Based Minibatch Selection Policy on Knowledge Graph Completion. On Arxiv. [PDF]

EMNLP 2019

Soumya Sharma*, Bishal Santra*, Abhik Jana, T Y S S Santosh, Niloy Ganguly and Pawan Goyal. Incorporating Domain Knowledge into Medical NLI using Knowledge Graphs. EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019, November 3-7, Hong Kong (short paper). [PDF]

ACL 2019

Amrith Krishna, Vishnu Dutt Sharma, Bishal Santra, Pavan Kumar Satuluri and Pawan Goyal (2019). Poetry to Prose Conversion in Sanskrit as a Linearisation Task: A case for Low-Resource Languages. ACL, July 28th - August 3rd, Florence, Italy (short paper). [PDF]

IAAI 2019

Abhinav Kumar*, Aishwarya Gupta*, Bishal Santra*, Lalitha Srinivasan*, Manasa Kolla*, Mayank Gupta* and Rishabh Singh*, VPDS: An AI-based Automated Vehicle Occupancy and Violation Detection System, IAAI (application conference of AAAI), 2019 [PDF]

EMNLP 2018

Amrith Krishna, Bishal Santra, Sasi Prasanth Bandaru, Sahu, Gaurav, Sharma, Vishnu Dutt, Satuluri, Pavan Kumar and Pawan Goyal (2018). Free as in Free Word Order: An Energy Based Model for Word Segmentation and Morphological Tagging in Sanskrit. EMNLP, Brussels, Belgium, October 31-November 4, 2018. [PDF]

COLING 2016

Amrith Krishna, Bishal Santra, Pavan Kumar Satuluri, Sasi Prasanth Bandaru, Bhumi Faldu, Yajuvendra Singh and Pawan Goyal (2016). Word Segmentation in Sanskrit Using Path Constrained Random Walk. 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling), Osaka, Japan, December 11-16, 2016 (Poster). [PDF]

M.Tech. Project (2017)

Bishal Santra. Supervised by (Prof. Priyadip Ray and Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti). Image Super-resolution with Sparse Image Representation using Dictionary Learning. [PDF]

Work Experience

Reviewer Activities

Conferences: EMNLP 2021, ACL 2021, EACL 2021, AAAI 2021, COLING 2020, EMNLP 2020, ACL 2020, ECIR 2020, EMNLP 2019

Teaching Assistant

  • Teaching Assistant for NLP & Python / Foundations of AI & ML (Centre for Artificial Intelligence, IIT Kharagpur, 2019)
  • Teaching Assistant / NLP (NPTEL) (IIT Kharagpur, Autumn 2019-‘20)
  • Teaching Assistant / Algorithms I Theory + Lab (IIT Kharagpur, Autumn 2019-‘20’)
  • Teaching Assistant / Formal Language & Automata Theory (IIT Kharagpur, Spring 2019-‘20)

Outside Academia

  • Budding Scientist / Conduent Labs India (Erstwhile Xerox Research Center India (XRCI)) (2017-‘18, Bangalore, India)
  • Android Developer Intern / Gray Routes Technology Pvt. Ltd. (Summer 2015, Mumbai, India)
  • Embedded System Software Developer / ExcellenceTech Pvt. Ltd. (Summer 2014, Salt Lake, Kolkata, India)
  • Web Team Head / Technology Transfer Group, IIT KGP (2013-‘15)
  • Web Team Sub‐Head / Spring Fest, IIT KGP (2013-‘14)

Education

PhD Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur Advisor: Dr. Pawan Goyal
Dual Degree (M.Tech and B.Tech) Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur CGPA (9.05/10)
Senior Secondary School Exam (CBSE Board) S.M. Arya Public School, New Delhi (Percentage: 90.8%)

Achievements and Scholarships

  • Prime Minister Research Fellowship (PMRF) towards pursuing PhD in Computer Science and Engineering
  • Means Cum Merit(MCM) Scholarship for Undergraduate students with CGPA higher than 7.5/10 at IIT Kharagpur
  • All India Rank of 917 in IIT-JEE
  • Qualified in both the rounds(written test and final interview) of KVPY 2011

Favorite Books

[Goodreads Profile]
  • Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem, Simon Singh
  • Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe, Simon Singh
  • The PhD Grind, Philip J. Guo
  • বিশ্বাসঘাতক, Narayan Sanyal
  • Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari

Favorite Games

  • Dishonored 1 and 2
  • Fallout 4
  • Deadcells

Extra Curricular Activities

  • Volunteer at the 6th ISCLS conference at IIT Kharagpur, 2019
  • Volunteer at the NSS(National Service Scheme) Program, IIT Kharagpur from July, 2012 to April, 2014
  • Member of Open‐IIT Bengali Dramatics,2014 team of Patel Hall of Residence
  • Member of Open‐IIT Choreography,2014 team of Patel Hall of Residence
  • Represented Patel Hall of Residence at Open‐IIT Bengali Elocution
  • Participated in HackU (conducted by Yahoo! ) and developed a Q&A forum exclusively for students of IIT Kharagpur