Urja Khurana

I am a PhD Student at the Computational Linguistics and Text Mining Lab (CLTL) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. My project is a part of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre under the Explainability pillar and is on the generalizability of NLP experiments. I work on understanding what kind of information a language model has captured to gain insights on how such a model will behave on unseen or out-of-distribution data. My research interests lie on the intersection of NLP and machine learning; error analysis, generalization, interpretability, and explainability. As a use case for my project, I am also working on hate speech detection and am committed to do research ethically.
I am being supervised by Antske Fokkens (VU), Eric Nalisnick (UvA), and Ivar Vermeulen (VU).

Before my PhD, I completed my BSc and MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam where I found my passion for Machine Learning, NLP, and Computer Vision and applying these techniques to improve society positively. I channeled this by being a mentor and TA for second year bachelor AI students and working on several projects where I was able to apply the knowledge I obtained. My bachelor thesis was on the detection of fake news headlines and statements and my master thesis was on explainable and generalized deepfake detection. More details can be found on my CV.