Neha Nayak Kennard

I’m a PhD candidate in Computer Science at UMass Amherst, advised by Prof. Andrew McCallum. Previously, I completed my MS in Computer Science at Stanford, advised by Prof. Chris Manning, and completed my Bachelor’s thesis at the Institute for Natural Language Processing in Stuttgart, supervised by PD Dr. Sabine Schulte im Walde.

Most recently, I worked on deep learning for dialogue at Google Research. Before that, I worked on learning word vectors that encoded challenging lexical relations, especially hypernymy, and then interrogated what they actually did encode with VecEval.

Currently, I’m working on problems in discourse structure at the document level. I’m particularly interested in understanding the interactions that take place during peer review through the lens of discourse. My hope is that this work will contribute to making peer review more transparent and equitable.

Here is a link to my resume.