CV
Education
- Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics, University of Toronto, 2015
- Dissertation: Resolving Shell Nouns
- Description: Developed computational methods for interpreting shell nouns, such as fact, idea, and issue, which refer to complex non-nominal entities in text.
- Committee: Graeme Hirst (advisor), Gerald Penn (chair), Suzanne Stevenson, Massimo Poesio (external examiner)
- M.Sc. in Natural Language Processing, University of Minnesota Duluth, 2009
- Dissertation: An Extended Analysis of a Method of All-Words Sense Disambiguation
- Description: Fine-tuned and experimented with a computational method which identifies senses (meaning) of all words in context.
- Committee: Ted Pedersen (advisor), Hudson Turner, Joseph Gallian
- M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Pune, 2005
Work experience
- July 2020 – current: Assistant Professor of Teaching
- University of British Columbia, Canada
- Taught courses in the Master of Data Science program
- October 2018 – June 2020: Teaching postdoctoral fellow
- University of British Columbia, Canada
- Department of Computer Science
- Taught courses in the Master of Data Science program
- October 2016 – September 2018: Postdoctoral fellow
- Simon Fraser University, Canada
- Developed computational methods for identifying constructiveness and toxicity in online communication so that people stay engaged in constructive discussion online.
- Supervisor: Maite Taboada
- April 2015 – August 2016: Mitacs Postdoctoral Fellow
- Privacy Analytics and University of Ottawa, Canada
- Carried out research on anonymization of unstructured data and developed risk-based methods to anonymize clinical study reports to help pharmaceutical companies comply with European Medical Agencies policy 007 of clinical data transparency.
- Supervisor: Khaled El Emam and Diana Inkpen
- January 2005 – July 2007: Associate Software Engineer
- Symantec Corporation, Pune, India
- Worked as a programmer
Research experience
- December 2014 – March 2015: Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow
- University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
- Carried out research on annotation and resolution of non-nominal anaphora.
- October 2012 – November 2012: Visiting Researcher
- Institute of Natural Language Processing, Stuttgart, Germany
- Carried out research on annotation and resolution of non-nominal anaphora. Participated and presented in the workshop on this topic.
- June 2008 – August 2008: Research Workshop Participant
- The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
- Invited participant at JHU Summer School and Workshop held by the Center of Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University in the vocal aging group.
Honours and fellowships
- Invitation to attend MIT Rising Stars in EECS 2015
- Mitacs Accelerate Scolarship October 2015 to September 2017
- EMNLP 2014 Google scholarship
- Doctoral Completion Award for academic year 2013-2014
- Monica Ryckman Bursary for academic year 2013-2014
Skills
- Programming languages: Python, C, C++
- Human Languages: Marathi (native), English and Hindi (fluent), Sanskrit (basic knowledge)
Patents
M. Scaiano, G. Middleton, V. Kolhatkar and K. El Emam. 2017. System and method to reduce a risk of re-identification of text de-identification tools. U.S. Patent US20170177907.
Publications
Pedersen, Ted and Kolhatkar, Varada: WordNet:: SenseRelate:: AllWords - A Broad Coverage Word Sense Tagger that Maximizes Semantic Relatedness. In Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Companion Volume: Demonstration Session, pp. 17–20 (2009)
Varada Kolhatkar and Graeme Hirst. (2009). Resolving "this-issue" anaphora. In Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning. pages 1255 -- 1265, Jeju Island, Korea, July. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Varada Kolhatkar, Heike Zinsmeister, and Graeme Hirst. 2013. Annotating anaphoric shell nouns with their antecedents. In Proceedings of the 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop and Interoperability with Discourse, pages 112–121, Sofia, Bulgaria, August. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Varada Kolhatkar, Heike Zinsmeister, and Graeme Hirst. 2013. Interpreting anaphoric shell nouns using antecedents of cataphoric shell nouns as training data. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 300–310, Seattle, Washington, USA, October. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Varada Kolhatkar and Graeme Hirst. 2014. Resolving shell nouns. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 499–510, Doha, Qatar, October. Association for Computational Linguistics.
M. Scaiano, G. Middleton, L. Arbuckle, V. Kolhatkar, L. Peyton, M. Dowling, D. S. Gipson, and K. El Emam. “A Unified Framework for Evaluating the Risk of Re-Identification of Text de-Identification Tools.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics 63 (2016): 174–183.
Constructive Language in News Comments. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language Online. Association for Computational Linguistics, Vancouver, BC, Canada, pages 11-17.
Varada Kolhatkar and Maite Taboada. 2017. Using New York Times Picks to Identify Constructive Comments. In Proceedings of NLP meets journalism workshop, Association for Computational Linguistics, Copenhagen, Denmark, pages 100-105.
Varada Kolhatkar, Adam Roussel, Stefanie Dipper, and Heike Zinsmeister. 2018. Anaphora with non-nominal antecedents in computational linguistics: A survey. Computational Linguistics, 44(3).
Theses
Talks
July 03, 2019
Invited Talk and Panel Discussion at the World Conference of Science Journalists, Lausanne, Switzerland
Teaching
Service and leadership
- Currently signed in to 43 different slack teams
