Sayantan Pal

spal5@buffalo.edu

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Hi! I'm a third-year PhD student in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at The State University of New York at Buffalo, advised by Professor Rohini K. Srihari. My research focuses on conversational AI, specifically building personalized large language models (LLMs) that adapt to user-specific traits and interactions. I am passionate about advancing dialogue systems that feel natural, empathetic, and human-like.

These days, I am working on designing AI agents capable of intrinsically capturing personality traits and tailoring their responses accordingly. Recently, we published a paper at COLING 2025 titled "Beyond Discrete Personas: Personality Modeling Through Journal Intensive Conversations", which explores how continuous personality traits can be modeled in dialogue systems. Feel free to check out the project!

My interest in personalization began in the summer of 2023 during a collaborative study with experts in the Communication and Disability Department at the University at Buffalo, led by Dr. Jeffry Higginbotham. We aimed to create conversational systems for individuals with non-standard speech, helping them communicate more effectively and authentically. This project focused on empowering differently-abled individuals by developing AI systems that could speak on their behalf with greater nuance and expressiveness. A portion of this work was recently published at the EMNLP 2024 Workshop - CustomNLP4U.

Previously, I had the great fortune of working with accomplished research scientists and collaborating with industry experts during my undergraduate studies, which helped me build a strong foundation for my research career. I had the opportunity to work with brilliant mentors including Dr. Miaga Chang (MITACS Globalink Internship, Canada), Dr. Prosenjit Gupta (Elahe Technologies Summer Internship, India), Dr. Pabitra Mitra (IIT-KGP Summer Internship, India), and Karthik Ragubathy (Amazon Alexa Student Influencer Program, India).

Apart from spending my time doing research, I hold a keen interest in music and playing instruments (Mohan Veena, Synth, Guitar, and more.)!

I am currently looking for summer 2025 internships in areas related to the personalization of LLMs and conversational agents. If my research interests align with your team, please don't hesitate to reach out!

For more details, feel free to check out my CV or drop me an email!

❄️ Recent
Empowering AAC Users: A Systematic Integration of Personal Narratives with Conversational AI
Sayantan Pal, Souvik Das, Rohini K. Srihari, Jeff Higginbotham, Jenna Bizovi
EMNLP '24 Workshop (CustomNLP4U) | Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
pdf| cite | poster | video | code | certificate

Mitigating Clickbait: An Approach to Spoiler Generation Using Multitask Learning
Sayantan Pal, Souvik Das, Rohini K. Srihari
ICON '23 | International Conference on Natural Language Processing
pdf | cite | poster | certificate

Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
May '21 - Jul '21, Supervisor: Dr. Maiga Chang (Professor, Athabasca University, Edmonton, AB, Canada)
- Developed a web-based Automatic Answering Service for COVID-19 queries, processing over 236,000 texts with NLP techniques
web| pdf| cite | slides| video | certificate

Amazon Alexa Student Influencer
June '20 - June '21, Mentor: Karthik Ragubathy (Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon, Bangalore WTC, India)
- Built Alexa skills using Node.js, organized developer events, and led a community of 250+ Alexa enthusiasts.
program| community| webinar day 1 | webinar day 2

Summer Research Internship
June '20 - Aug '20, Supervisor: Dr. Pabitra Mitra (Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, WB, India)
- Researched land-cover classification in satellite images, reviewed semantic segmentation algorithms, and analyzed data from various sources.
certificate | notebook

Elahe Technologies Summer Internship
May '20 - Jul '20, Supervisor: Dr. Prosenjit Gupta (Professor, Elahe Technologies, Kolkata, WB, India)
- Conducted sentiment analysis on 346,355 Amazon HPC reviews, vectorized data with Tf-Idf and Word2Vec, achieving ~85% accuracy.
code | certificate

❄️ Instructor
CSE 535 - Information Retrieval (Fall '23)
This course delves deep into text-based information retrieval (IR) techniques, offering a comprehensive look at search engines
course| feedback

❄️ Teaching Assistant
CSE 635, CSE 4/560, CSE 4/587
- Spring '24: Graduate Teaching Assistant for CSE 635 - NLP and Text Mining
- Spring '23: Graduate Teaching Assistant for CSE 4/560 - Data Mining Query Language
- Fall '22: Graduate Teaching Assistant for CSE 4/587 - Data Intensive Computing

❄️ Guest Speaker
Project Converse 2023
Project Converse is aimed at improving in-person expressive communication for individuals with complex communication needs (CCN) who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC).
home| participants| slides

❄️ Reviewer
EMNLP 2023

Association for Computing Machinery Student Chapter - HITK
Chair (2021-22), Webmaster (2019-20)
website | youtube | facebook | linkedin

❄️ Grand Finalists
TVS Credit E.P.I.C Season 2 2021
Qualified for the Grand Finale of TVS Credit E.P.I.C Season 2 among the top 10 teams
award | certificate

❄️ International Rank 21
International Informatics Olympiad 2014
Secured International Rank 21 in International Informatics Olympiad (IIO) 2014, Level 2 (Obtained silver medal)
certificate