Aug 2024 @ACL in Bangkok : I am leading the organization of the Workshop on Human-Centered Large Language Modeling! Follow @HuCLLM
"The world's mine oyster!"
(As Shakespeare captured it best.)
Nikita Soni
I am a PhD candidate at Stony Brook University, New York, co-advised by H. Andrew Schwartz and Niranjan Balasubramanian.My research focuses on integrating the author's context into language modeling to build human-context-aware models that can be useful in multiple avenues, such as mental health and education. I lead the workshop Human-Centered Large Language Modeling(1st edition at ACL 2024). I have presented at the tutorial on Contextualizing Language with Humans(at NAACL 2024). I am also leading a SemEval-2026 shared task on Predicting Variation in Emotional Affect(at ACL 2026). I also organize Birds of Feather sessions(1st editions at ACL 2024) for human-centered LLMs mentorship and community building, as well as another to discuss mental health among researchers(students and academics alike). I actively serve as a reviewer for many top NLP conferences and workshops.
I am very excited about the following research directions:
Building and Evaluating Human-Context-aware Language Models (ACL 2022, NAACL 2024, EMNLP 2021). How can we design models that address the ecological fallacy presented in LLMs via pre-training text sequences independently, even when authored by the same person, discounting the human (author's) context? For example, independently processing two blogs written by the same person: one where they express how deeply they were affected by an altercation with a loved one, and another where they write about their childhood trauma with the same loved one, can miss the author's context in better understanding their emotions.
Human-Centered Application and Interdisciplinary focus (ACL 2022, NAACL 2024, NAACL 2054, WASSA 2024, CLPsych 2025, EMNLP 2021). Applying human-context-aware models to a range of downstream human-centered NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis, stance detection (e.g., towards abortion), social scientific tasks such as assessing age and personality, psychological tasks such as assessing affect and empathy, and mental health applications such as identifying suicide risks.
Datasets with Human Context (In submission). Building and curating datasets that ethically include anonymized human contexts.
Benchmarking Human-Context-aware Models (Ongoing work). Creating benchmarks to standardize evaluations for human-context-aware models.
Personal
Professional
Recent Updates
Jun 2024 @NAACL in Mexico City : I will be giving an oral presentation on our position paper Large Human Language Models: A Need and the Challenges!
Jun 2024 @NAACL 2024 in Mexico City : I will be a presenter at the Tutorial on From Text to Context: Contextualizing Language with Humans, Groups, and Communities for Socially Aware NLP!
Apr 2024 : Invited to attend the CRA Grad Cohort for Women Workshop in Minnesota, and my interview will be recorded!
Apr 2024 : Invited to the German Consulate New York to attend the symposium Smart Minds Meet Smart Machines - AI For Science and the Public Good.
Mar 2024 : I will be giving a guest lecture to the NLP grad class at Stony Brook University on Transformer and Self-Attention!
Mar 2024 : Our position paper arguing for Large Human Language Models is accepted in NAACL 2024!
Publications
Addressing the Ecological Fallacy in Larger LLMs with the Author’s Context
In Submission at EMNLP 2025 (Long) preprint
Systematic Evaluation of Auto-Encoding and Large Language Model Representations for Capturing Author States and Traits
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025 (Long) conference
Evaluation of LLMs-based Hidden States as Author Representations for Psychological Human-Centered NLP Tasks
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025 (Short) conference
Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop workshop
The Consistent Lack of Variance of Psychological Factors Expressed by LLMs and Spambots
Detecting AI-Generated Content Workshop at COLING 2025 (Short) conference
Large Human Language Models: A Need and the Challenges
The 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Long) conference
Comparing Pre-trained Human Language Models: Is it Better with Human Context as Groups, Individual Traits, or Both?
14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2024), ACL 2024 (Long) workshop
Proceedings of the 1st Human-Centered Large Language Modeling Workshop
1st Human-Centered Large Language Modeling Workshop (ACL 2024) workshop
From Text to Context: Contextualizing Language with Humans, Groups, and Communities for Socially Aware NLP
2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association conference
Automatic Implicit Motives Codings are at Least as Accurate as Humans’ and 99% Faster
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences,2024 (Journal) journal
Robust language-based mental health assessments in time and space through social media
Nature npj Digital Medicine (2024) journal
Archetypes and Entropy: Theory-Driven extraction of Evidence for Suicide Risk
CLPsych workshop in EACL (2024) workshop
I slept like a baby: Using human traits to characterize deceptive ChatGPT and human text
IACT workshop at ACM SIGIR conference (2023) workshop
WWBP-SQT-lite: Multi-level Models and Difference Embeddings for Moments of Change Identification in Mental Health Forums
CLPsych Workshop in NAACL (2022) workshop
Detecting Dissonant Stance in Social Media: The Role of Topic Exposure.
NLP+CSS Workshop in EMNLP (2022) workshop
MeLT: Message-Level Transformer with Masked Document Representations as Pre-Training for Stance Detection
EMNLP-Findings (2021) conference
Recent Services
Organizing a SemEval-2026 Shared Task: Predicting Variation in Emotional Valence and Arousal over Time from Ecological Essays
Nikita Soni, H. Andrew Schwartz, Tony Bui, Ryan Boyd, August Håkan Nilsson, Syeda Mahwish, Adithya V Ganesan, Lyle Ungar, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Saif M. Mohammad
Organized the 1st Human-Centered Large Language Modeling Workshop co-located with ACL 2024
Nikita Soni, Lucie Flek, Ashish Sharma, Diyi Yang, Sara Hooker, and H. Andrew Schwartz.
Tutorial on From Text to Context: Contextualizing Language with Humans, Groups, and Communities for Socially Aware NLP at NAACL 2024
Adithya V Ganesan, Siddharth Mangalik, Vasudha Varadarajan, Nikita Soni, Swanie Juhng, João Sedoc, H. Andrew Schwartz, Salvatore Giorgi, and Ryan Boyd
Organized a Birds of Feather Session at ACL 2024 focused on mentorship and community building for Human-Centered Large Language Modeling.
Organized a Birds of Feather Session at ACL 2024 to engage in an open dialogue on mental health challenges faced by graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and researchers.
Program Committee at EMNLP 2025, NAACL 2025, ACL 2024, NAACL 2024, NAACL 2023, EMNLP 2023, EMNLP 2022
Program Committee at The 5th workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS).
Program Committee at ICWSM Data Challenge 2023
Volunteer for Diversity & Inclusion Committee at NAACL 2022
Experience
Education
Research Visits
Research Internships
Software Engineering Jobs