Hello World! I am Vibhor Agarwal, a final year PhD Researcher at University of Surrey, UK, working with Prof. Nishanth Sastry. My research interests are in Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models and Graphs to model and understand online social media conversations by developing graph-based models to effectively capture conversational context and tackle online harms such as hate speech, misinformation, etc. I also work on LLMs for content moderation to rephrase hate speech into non-hate content without changing the meaning. I have also worked towards the safety of LLMs by detecting and mitigating problems such as hallucinations in code generation and also for healthcare queries. I have done NLP Research Internship at JP Morgan AI Research and Rewire. I was also a Visiting Researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA and Queen Mary University of London in the past.
Previously, I worked as a Site Reliability Engineer at Media.net (Directi) in Mumbai, India for 1.5 years. In June 2020, I graduated with a Computer Science and Engineering (B. Tech.) degree from The LNMIIT, Jaipur. My honours include Best Bachelor's Thesis Award and an overall CGPA of 9.45 out of 10. I was also a Google Summer of Code developer in 2018 and contributed to the open source project, Oppia.
Research Publications
I have been fortunate to contribute to a wide range of research directions, including natural language processing, LLMs, graph machine learning, and computational social science and have published in top-tier conferences and journals including ACM Web Conference (WWW), ACM Transactions on the Web, ACL, CIKM, AAAI ICWSM, ACM Web Science, etc. For the full list of publications, please refer to my Google Scholar profile.
- GraphNLI: A Graph-based Natural Language Inference Model for Polarity Prediction in Online Debates [Paper] [Dataset] [GitHub]
Vibhor Agarwal, Sagar Joglekar, Anthony P. Young, and Nishanth Sastry
The ACM Web Conference (TheWebConf 2022) - A Graph-Based Context-Aware Model to Understand Online Conversations [Paper] [Dataset] [GitHub]
Vibhor Agarwal, Anthony P. Young, Sagar Joglekar, and Nishanth Sastry
ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB 2023) - Decentralised Moderation for Interoperable Social Networks: A Conversation-based Approach for Pleroma and the Fediverse [Paper] [GitHub]
Vibhor Agarwal, Aravindh Raman, Nishanth Sastry, Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro
International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2024) - Annobert: Effectively Representing Multiple Annotators’ Label Choices to Improve Hate Speech Detection [Paper] [GitHub]
Wenjie Yin*, Vibhor Agarwal*, Aiqi Jiang*, Arkaitz Zubiaga, and Nishanth Sastry
International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2023) - Improving the Detection of Multilingual Online Attacks with Rich Social Media Data from Singapore [Paper]
Janosch Haber, Bertie Vidgen, Matthew Chapman, Vibhor Agarwal, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Yong Keong Yap, Paul Röttger
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023) - "Way back then": A Data-driven View of 25+ years of Web Evolution [Paper] [Dataset] [GitHub]
Vibhor Agarwal and Nishanth Sastry
The ACM Web Conference (TheWebConf 2022) - Under the Spotlight: Web Tracking in Indian Partisan News Websites [Paper] [Dataset] [GitHub]
Vibhor Agarwal*, Yash Vekaria*, Pushkal Agarwal, Sangeeta Mahapatra, Shounak Set, Sakthi Balan, Nishanth Sastry, and Nicolas Kourtellis
15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2021) - Differential Tracking Across Topical Webpages of Indian News Media [Paper] [Dataset] [GitHub]
Yash Vekaria*, Vibhor Agarwal*, Pushkal Agarwal, Sangeeta Mahapatra, Sakthi Balan Muthiah, Nishanth Sastry, and Nicolas Kourtellis
13th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci 2021) - A Metadata-based Event Detection Method using Temporal Herding Factor and Social Synchrony on Twitter Data [Paper]
Nirmal Sivaraman, Vibhor Agarwal, Yash Vekaria, and Sakthi Balan
15th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2021) - Video Surveillance System for Female Security using Keras
Vibhor Agarwal
Poster presented at The PyCon US 2020, PA, USA
Awards & Achievements
- Received Turing Grant for visiting Georgia Tech in Summer 2023.
- Received Ultimate Web Science Quiz Award at ACM WebSci 2021.
- Received funded PhD studentship at University of Surrey, UK.
- Received the Best Bachelor’s Thesis Award in the graduated class of 2020 at LNMIIT, Jaipur, India.
- Awarded PyCon US 2020 scholarship to attend the largest Python Conference in the world and present my poster titled, "Video Surveillance System for Female Security using Keras"
- Quarter Finalist in India Innovation Challenge Design Contest’ 2018 organised by Department of Science and Technology and IIM Bangalore for our robust ‘Pro-active Video Surveillance System’
- Awarded Meritorious Certification and Scholarship for securing position in top 1 percentile at LNMIIT, Jaipur
- Awarded Certificate of Appreciation for Google Summer of Code’ 18 at LNMIIT, Jaipur
- Earned Silver Medal at State level Mental Ability Competition (Abacus)
Work Experience
- JP Morgan AI Research (Sep - Dec 2023)
NLP Research Internship (London, UK) - Georgia Institute of Technology (Jul - Aug 2023)
Visiting Researcher (Atlanta, Georgia, USA) - Queen Mary University of London (Oct 2022 - Apr 2023)
Visiting Researcher (London, UK) - Rewire Online (Jul - Sep 2022)
NLP Research Internship (London, UK) - The Alan Turing Institute (Jul - Sep 2021)
Visiting Researcher, Data Study Group (Remote) - Media.net (Directi) (Jan 2020 - Jun 2021)
Site Reliability Engineer (Mumbai, India) - SLK Software (May - Jul 2019)
Software Engineering Internship (Bengaluru, India) - Google Summer of Code 2018 (May - Aug 2018)
Open Source Developer at The Oppia Foundation (Remote)
Research Talks & Conferences
- North Carolina State University: Gave a research talk in AI Institute, NCSU in September 2023.
- GeorgiaTech: Gave a research talk in August 2023.
- QMUL: Gave a research talk in December 2022.
- ELLIS Cambridge Summer School: Presented my poster in July 2022.
- King's College London: Gave a research talk in April 2022.
- ACL 2021, 2022, 2023: Received Diveristy and Inclusion scholarship to attend this top NLP conference.
- SIGIR 2021: Participated as a student volunteer in the conference.
- WebSci 2021: Presented our paper "Differential Tracking Across Topical Webpages of Indian News Media".
- ICWSM 2021: Presented our paper "Under the Spotlight: Web Tracking in Indian Partisan News Websites".
- PyCon US 2020 (PA, USA): Poster presentation on Video Surveillance System for Female Security using Keras
- PyJaipur 2018 (Jaipur, India): Talk on 'How to crack Google Summer of Code' and share my GSoC' 18 experiences.
Skills
- Programming Languages: Python, Java, JavaScript, C, MATLAB
- Artificial Intelligence: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing
- Tools: PyTorch, TensorFlow, DGL, Scikit-Learn, Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib, and Seaborn
- Frameworks: Flask (Python), AngularJS, ReactJS, and Node.js (JavaScript)
- Database: MySQL, SQLite and MongoDB and Redis (NoSQL)
- Version Control: Git and Github
- Other Tools: Docker, Jenkins, Terraform, Puppet