← Search

Akhila Yerukola

9 accepted papers

2026

Interactive Agents to Overcome Underspecificity in Software Engineering

ICLR 2026poster

AI agents are increasingly being deployed to automate tasks, often based on underspecified user instructions. Making unwarranted assumptions to compensate for the missing information and failing to ask clarifying questions can lead to suboptimal outcomes, safety risks due to tool misuse, and wasted…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Mind the Gesture: Evaluating AI Sensitivity to Culturally Offensive Non-Verbal Gestures

ACL 2025long

Gestures are an integral part of non-verbal communication, with meanings that vary across cultures, and misinterpretations that can have serious social and diplomatic consequences. As AI systems become more integrated into global applications, ensuring they do not inadvertently perpetuate cultural o…

2025

NormAd: A Framework for Measuring the Cultural Adaptability of Large Language Models

NAACL 2025long

To be effectively and safely deployed to global user populations, large language models (LLMs) may need to adapt outputs to user values and cultures, not just know about them. We introduce NormAd, an evaluation framework to assess LLMs’ cultural adaptability, specifically measuring their ability to…

2025

Words Like Knives: Backstory-Personalized Modeling and Detection of Violent Communication

EMNLP 2025

Conversational breakdowns in close relationships are deeply shaped by personal histories and emotional context, yet most NLP research treats conflict detection as a general task, overlooking the relational dynamics that influence how messages are perceived. In this work, we leverage nonviolent commu

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic. Generative Evaluation of Non-Literal Intent Resolution in LLMs

ACL 2024short

Humans often express their communicative intents indirectly or non-literally, which requires their interlocutors—human or AI—to understand beyond the literal meaning of words. While most existing work has focused on discriminative evaluations, we present a new approach to generatively evaluate large…

2023

$\textit{``Don't Take This Out of Context!''}$ On the Need for Contextual Models and Evaluations for Stylistic Rewriting

EMNLP 2023long main

Most existing stylistic text rewriting methods and evaluation metrics operate on a sentence level, but ignoring the broader context of the text can lead to preferring generic, ambiguous, and incoherent rewrites. In this paper, we investigate integrating the preceding textual context into both the $\…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Beyond Denouncing Hate: Strategies for Countering Implied Biases and Stereotypes in Language

EMNLP 2023long findings

Counterspeech, i.e., responses to counteract potential harms of hateful speech, has become an increasingly popular solution to address online hate speech without censorship. However, properly countering hateful language requires countering and dispelling the underlying inaccurate stereotypes implied…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

COBRA Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Effects and Harms of Offensive Statements

ACL 2023findings

Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Understanding the harms and offensiveness of statements requires reasoning about the social and situational context in which statements are made. For example, the utterance “your English is very good” may implicitly signal an i…

2022

Explainable Slot Type Attentions to Improve Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling

EMNLP 2022finding

Joint intent detection and slot filling is a key research topic in natural language understanding (NLU). Existing joint intent and slot filling systems analyze and compute features collectively for all slot types, and importantly, have no way to explain the slot filling model decisions. In this work…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar