Hi! I’m Maharaj, a third-year fourth-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at the Natural Language and Information Processing (NLIP) Lab in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) supervised by Prof. Maunendra Sankar Desarkar and Dr. Anoop Kunchukuttan. My research interests include:
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Culture NLP:
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Multilinguality:
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Large Language Models:
Prior to joining the Ph.D. program, I completed my Master of Technology (M.Tech.) at Central Institute of Technology Kokrajhar (CITK), CFTI, Deemed to be University under MoE, India. I was fortunate to be supervised by Dr. Sanjib Narzary, and I worked on Machine Translation for the under-resourced Indian language Bodo. I served as a Teaching Assistant (TA) for the master’s course Advanced Computer Network Lab (PCSE271) and the undergraduate course Programming for Problem Solving Lab (UCSE271). I was a TA for the master’s course Mobile and Pervasive Computing (PCSE115), instructed by Prof. Pranav Kumar Singh.
In 2020, I had the good fortune to co-found a startup “DigitalOma” along with my friends.
I received my Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Computer Science & Engineering from CIT Kokrajhar, India in 2019 and worked on a thesis titled “English-Bodo Neural Machine Translation using Attention Mechanism”.
You can find more information in my CV.
News:
- Our EMNLP 2025 paper, "DIWALI - Diversity and Inclusivity aWare cuLture specific Items for India: Dataset and Assessment of LLMs for Cultural Text Adaptation in Indian Context," has been selected for an oral presentation!
- I will be attending IndoML 2025 at BITS Hyderabad, where I'll be presenting a poster.
- Paper accepted! Paper titled DIWALI - Diversity and Inclusivity aWare cuLture specific Items for India: Dataset and Assessment of LLMs for Cultural Text Adaptation in Indian Context accepted at EMNLP 2025.
- Paper accepted! Paper titled MorphTok: Morphologically Grounded Tokenization for Indic languages accepted at Tokenization Workshop (TokShop) @ ICML 2025. Work done in collaboration with IIT Bombay and IIT Mandi.
- Had JRF to SRF conversion seminar - officially transitioned from Junior to Senior Research Fellow. Time flies!
- 🏆 Won Best Poster Award (2nd) at IndoML 2024. Check out the poster!
- Attending IndoML 2024 at BITS Pilani Goa
- Our MT system submission ranked first for MultiIndic22MT shared task at WMT 24.
- Gave my Research Proposal Seminar (RPS). Ready to embark on my research journey.
- Humbled to receive the ACL Diversity and Inclusion Award (D&I Award) and The Big Picture Grant. Making in-person attendance of EMNLP 2023 possible. Heartfelt thanks to the D&I and The Big Picture workshop team.