Introduction

I am a PhD student and instructor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University at Buffalo, New York. I am advised by Dr. Rohini K. Srihari, and my current research focuses on argumentation mining from discourse and persuasive conversational systems. In general my research interests include purposeful conversational systems (i.e. conversational systems for persuasion, deliberation, and negotiation), open domain (chit-chat) conversational systems, multi-lingual conversational systems, and any topics in Natural Language Processing that can be geared towards social good.

Research

• ArgU: A Controllable Factual Argument Generator. Sougata Saha and Rohini Srihari. ACL 2023. Code
• Rudolf Christoph Eucken at SemEval-2023 Task 4: An Ensemble Approach for Identifying Human Values from Arguments. Sougata Saha and Rohini Srihari. ACL 2023. Code
• Dialo-AP: A Dependency Parsing Based Argument Parser for Dialogues. Sougata Saha, Souvik Das and Rohini Srihari. Coling 2022. Code
• EDU-AP: Elementary Discourse Unit based Argument Parser. Sougata Saha, Souvik Das and Rohini Srihari. SIGDIAL 2022 (Best Paper Nomination https://2022.sigdial.org/best-paper-nominations/). Code
• Using Multi-Encoder Fusion Strategies to Improve Personalized Response Selection. Souvik Das, Sougata Saha and Rohini Srihari. Coling 2022.
• Proto-Gen: An end-to-end neural generator for persona and knowledge grounded response generation. Souvik Das, Sougata Saha and Rohini Srihari. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Customized Chat Grounding Persona and Knowledge @ Coling 2022.
• Stylistic Response Generation by Controlling Personality Traits and Intent. Sougata Saha, Souvik Das and Rohini Srihari. Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI @ ACL 2022. Code
• UB Health Miners@SMM4H’22: Exploring Pre-processing Techniques To Classify Tweets Using Transformer Based Pipelines. Roshan Khatri, Sougata Saha, Souvik Das, Rohini Srihari. Proceedings of The Seventh Workshop on Social Media Mining for Health Applications, Workshop & Shared Task @ Coling 2022.
• Let’s Chat: Understanding User Expectations in Socialbot Interactions. Elizabeth Soper, Erin Pacquetet, Sougata Saha, Souvik Das, Rohini Srihari. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bridging Human–Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing @ NAACL 2022.
• Proto: A Neural Cocktail for Generating Appealing Conversations. Sougata Saha, Souvik Das, Elizabeth Soper, Erin Pacquetet, Rohini Srihari Proceedings of the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 4, 2021.
• Similarity Based Label Smoothing For Dialogue Generation. Sougata Saha, Souvik Das, Rohini Srihari. Arxiv Preprint 2021.
• Autobots Ensemble: Identifying and Extracting Adverse Drug Reaction from Tweets using Transformer Based Pipelines. Sougata Saha, Souvik Das, Prashi Khurana, Rohini Srihari. Proceedings of the Fifth Social Media Mining for Health Applications Workshop & Shared Task @ Coling 2020.
• Medical Literature Mining and Retrieval in a Conversational Setting. Souvik Das, Sougata Saha, Rohini Srihari. International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, 2020.

Teaching

• Instructor for Introduction to Information Retrieval (CSE 4/535) - Fall 2022
  • Course Syllabus: CSE535-Syllabus-Fall2022.pdf
  • Class Pictures: cse_535_class_pics
• Teaching Assistant for Natural Language Processing and Text Mining (CSE 635) - Spring 2022
• Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Information Retrieval (CSE 4/535) - Fall 2021
• Teaching Assistant for Natural Language Processing and Text Mining (CSE 635) - Spring 2021
• Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Information Retrieval (CSE 4/535) - Fall 2020
• Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Machine Learning (CSE 4/575) - Fall 2020

Professional Activities

• Organizer, 9th Workshop on Argument Mining at Coling 2022
• Conference reviewer, (EMNLP 2022, COLING 2022, ICON 2022)
• Journal Reviewer, The journal of Artificial Intelligence, Elsevier
• President, UB Computer Science and Engineering Graduate Student Association (CSE GSA) 2020-2021
• Team Leader, Proto @ Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4, 2020-2021