Mahnaz Koupaee

Department of Computer Science
Stony Brook University

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University under the supervision of Prof. Niranjan Balasubramanian. At Stony Brook, I am a member of the LUNR (Language Understanding and Reasoning) Lab . Before joining Stony Brook, I received my M.S. in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) under the supervision of Prof. William Yang Wang.

My research is in the field of Natural Language Processing, more specifically using Large Language Models (LLMs) as primitives to reason about events and model how real-life scenarios unfold. I’m also very much interested in abstractive text summarization, mainly towards more controllable, factual summary generation and automatic summary evaluation using LLMs.

mkoupaee at cs.stonybrook.edu

Publications

  • SAGE-viz: SchemA GEneration and Visualization
    Sugam Devare*, Mahnaz Koupaee*, Gautham Gunapati, Sayontan Ghosh, Sai Vallurupalli, Yash Kumar Lal, Francis Ferraro, Nathanael Chambers, Greg Durrett, Raymond Mooney, Katrin Erk, Niranjan Balasubramanian, EMNLP 2023 (System Demonstrations).

  • Modeling Complex Event Scenarios via Simple Entity-focused Questions
    Mahnaz Koupaee, Greg Durrett, Nathanael Chambers, Niranjan Balasubramanian, EACL 2023.

  • PASTA: A Dataset for Modeling Participant States in Narratives
    Sayontan Ghosh, Mahnaz Koupaee, Isabella Chen, Francis Ferraro, Nathanael Chambers, Niranjan Balasubramanian, TACL 2023.

  • Don't Let Discourse Confine Your Model: Sequence Perturbations for Improved Event Language Models
    Mahnaz Koupaee, Greg Durrett, Nathanael Chambers, Niranjan Balasubramanian, ACL 2021.

  • Author's Sentiment Prediction
    Mohaddeseh Bastan, Mahnaz Koupaee, Youngseo Son, Richard Sicoli, Niranjan Balasubramanian COLING 2020.

  • Modeling preconditions in text with a crowd-sourced dataset
    Heeyoung Kwon, Mahnaz Koupaee, Pratyush Singh, Gargi Sawhney, Anmol Shukla, Keerthi Kumar Kallur, Nathanael Chambers, Niranjan Balasubramanian EMNLP 2020.

  • Wikihow: A large scale text summarization dataset
    Mahnaz Koupaee, William Yang Wang, arXiv 2018.

  • Analyzing and interpreting convolutional neural networks in nlp
    Mahnaz Koupaee, William Yang Wang, arXiv 2018.

  • Identification of Disease States for Trauma Patients using Commonly Available Hospital Data
    Mahnaz Koupaee, Yuanyang Zhang, Tie Bo Wu, Mitchell Cohen, Linda Petzold, ICCABS 2018.

    • Experiences

  • Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon AWS AI (May 2024-Aug 2024)

    ■ Mentors: Hang Su, Saab Mansour

  • Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon AGI (Jun 2023-Dec 2023)

    ■ Mentors: Mengwen Liu, Markus Dreyer, Kevin Small

  • Teaching Assistant at Stony Brook University, Department of Computer science
  • Teaching Assistant at University of California Santa Barbara, Department of Computer science

    • Services

  • Reviewer, ACL Rolling Review, 2023 -
  • Reviewer, Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023
    • Plain Academic