Arpit Sharma

Staff Data Scientist
Walmart Global Tech

About Me

I am a Computer Scientist. My area of research include Natural Language Understanding for Conversational Assistant, Semantic Parsing, Commonsense Reasoning, Commonsense Knowledge Extraction and Automated Question Answering.
I am currently working as a Staff Data Scientist at Walmart Global Tech., Sunnyvale CA. The job responsibilities include research and development in the field of NLU for the chatbot platform of Walmart. The chatbot platform is used both internally (Walmart associates) and externally (in the voice shopping assistant of Walmart)

Background

I graduated with a PhD degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University in July 2019. My PhD dissertation was on the topic of developing tools and techniques for Natural Language Understanding. My dissertation is titled, "Towards Understanding Natural Language: Semantic Parsing, Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition, Reasoning Framework and Applications".
Earlier, I graduated with a Master's degree (summa cum laude) in Computer Science from Arizona State University in December 2014. During my master's degree I worked in the field of Natural Language Understanding, on the topic of hard Co-reference resolution and Semantic Parsing. My thesis is titled, "Solving Winograd Schema Challenge : Using Semantic Parsing, Automatic Knowledge Acquisition and Logical Reasoning".

Current Research

Towards developing an explainable Natural Language Understanding system for Virtual Assistants, with following capabilities:

Ability to use context to predict current actions of a human in a human-chatbot conversation: Medium Article

Featured Open-source Projects

A General Purpose Semantic Parser for English: Knowledge Parser (K-Parser)
Events Based Conditional Knowledge: KNET

Selected Publications (Google Scholar)

Improving Intent Classification in an E-commerce Voice Assistant by Using Inter-Utterance Context
Arpit Sharma
Proceedings of The 3rd Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP. 2020.
(PDF) (BibTex)

Using Answer Set Programming for Commonsense Reasoning in the Winograd Schema Challenge
Arpit Sharma
ICLP, 2019
(PDF) (BibTex)

Combining Knowledge Hunting and Neural Language Models to Solve the Winograd Schema Challenge
Arpit Sharma, Ashok Prakash, Arindam Mitra and Chitta Baral
ACL, 2019
(PDF) (BibTex)

Semantic Representation and Parsing for Voice eCommerce
Arpit Sharma, Vivek Kaul and Shankara B Subramanya
R2K Workshop, 2018
(PDF) (BibTex)

Towards Understanding Natural Language: Semantic Parsing, Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition and Applications.
Arpit Sharma
In Proceedings of Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, Doctoral Consortium 2016.
(PDF) (BibTex)

Automatic Extraction of Events-Based Conditional Commonsense Knowledge
Arpit Sharma and Chitta Baral
In Proceedings of thirtieth Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence workshop. AAAI Press, Workshop on Knowledge Extraction from Text, 2016
(PDF) (BibTex)

Generating Semantic Graphs from Image Descriptions for Alzheimer's Disease Detection
Arpit Sharma, Davy Weissenbacher, Chitta Baral and Graciela Gonzalez
In Proceedings of (In)Coherence of discourse 3 - 2015, 2015
(PDF) (BibTex)

Towards Addressing the Winograd Schema Challenge - Building and Using a Semantic Parser and a Knowledge Hunting Module
Arpit Sharma, Nguyen H. Vo, Somak Aditya and Chitta Baral
In Proceedings of Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, 2015
(PDF) (BibTex)

Identifying Various Kinds of Event Mentions in K-Parser Output
Arpit Sharma, Nguyen H. Vo, Somak Aditya and Chitta Baral
In Proceedings of NAACL 2015 The 3rd Workshop on Events: Definition, Coreference, and Representation
(PDF) (BibTex)

An Approach to Solve Winograd Schema Challenge Using Automatically Extracted Commonsense Knowledge
Arpit Sharma, Nguyen Vo, Shruti Gaur and Chitta Baral
In AAAI Spring Symposium, Logical formulations of commonsense reasoning, 2015
(PDF) (BibTex)

Solving Winograd Schema Challenge: Using Semantic Parsing, Automatic Knowledge Acquisition and Logical Reasoning
Arpit Sharma
Master's thesis, Arizona State University, 2014
(PDF) (BibTex)