Stories, memories, and messages from our alumni community
Current Position: Institute Chair Professor, CSE Department, IIT Bombay, Professor-in-Charge, Koita Centre for Digital Health
Prof. Ganesh reflects with pride on CFILT’s 25-year journey and its enduring contributions to Indian language technology and computational linguistics. He highlights how CFILT has consistently fostered innovation, pioneering research, and collaboration between linguists and technologists. The centre has played a key role in shaping the future of multilingual NLP in India and nurturing a vibrant research community.
He acknowledges the dedication and creativity of all students, researchers, and faculty who have been part of this legacy. This milestone, he notes, is not only a celebration of past achievements but also an inspiration to pursue new frontiers in language technology and societal impact. He looks forward to CFILT continuing to scale new heights with excellence, innovation, and meaningful contributions in the years ahead.
Current Position: Professor, Department of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras, Founder AI4Bharat
I was a M.Tech student at CFILT from 2006-2008 and then a PhD student from 2008-2012. During my time their I contributed to ILMT and EILMT projects. Along with some of my peers, I was exploring the idea of reusing resources to help low-resource languages benefit from high resource languages. In modern NLP, this idea has now been formalised as crosslingual transfer and I am proud that I got the opportunity to do some of the initial work in this direction during my time at CFILT.
CFILT’s mentorship struck the perfect balance: plenty of freedom to chase my own ideas, plus steady hand-holding whenever I hit a wall. Pushpak Sir and senior lab mates gave constant encouragement, practical feedback, and the resources I needed to keep moving forward.
CFILT has always been ahead of its time in three ways: Focus on Indian languages early on: Long before “low-resource NLP” became a buzz-word, CFILT was collecting corpora and building tools and resources for Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit. Practical tools, not just papers: From the IndowWordnet to MT tools on the CFILT website, the lab has delivered systems that real users can try. Training talent: Many alumni now lead NLP teams across India, spreading CFILT’s emphasis on rigorous, language-centric research.
Stay curious, stay collaborative. Work on hard language problems that matter to everyday users, and keep releasing your data and code. The impact of one well-documented resource can last for decades. Good luck, and enjoy the journey!
Current Position: Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Sci & Eng, UNSW Sydney Australia
Year: 2009-11 Type: R&D and Masters Project Topic: Sentiment Analysis Notable contributions: ACL Demo, EMNLP, COLING, ICON tutorial Year: 2013-18 Type: PhD Topic: Sarcasm detection Notable contributions: ACL, EMNLP, CONLL, AAAI demo, IJCNLP demo.
I learned what I know about research and NLP from CFILT. Pushpak Bhattacharyya is still my life guru, and I seek his blessings each time I am doing something important in my career. "Linguistics is the eye and computation is the body" -- is a maxim that will stay with me all my life.
CFILT is the most famous NLP lab in India - as far as the narrative in Australia is concerned. CFILT's foundational work in Indian language WordNet, machine translation and innumerable tools and resources is a strong foundation for Indian language NLP.
We are extremely privileged to have the badge of CFILT in our profile. We are a community, and I hope we continue to help and support each other, along with keeping the CFILT flag flying high with whatever we do in life. The fact that we don't treat our datasets as merely 'characters'/'strings' but as 'human language' laden in meaning, intent and values is an important lesson CFILT has inculcated in us. We must cherish that.
Current Position: Assistant Professor @ National Institute of Technology Calicut
I was a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya. I worked on the problem of coreference resolution
Being part of the lab provided me with invaluable opportunities for insightful discussions with fellow research students and associates. The diverse working styles and ideas not only enriched my research but also broadened my perspective. A significant benefit of being in the lab was exposure to a wide range of problems, which has since enabled me to quickly adapt to new research challenges in NLP. The lab always helped me to get relieved during stressful phases. I cherish the sweet memories of my time in the lab, especially the discussions with Abhijit Mishra, Anoop Kunchukuttan, and Aditya Joshi.
The lab's culture where PhD students, Masters students and research associates work together under the guidance of Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya is the key to all the major contributions from the lab. CFILT laid the foundation stone for most of the major contributions to Indian language NLP from the various labs across the country.
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Practice, UT Austin iSchool
At CFILT, IIT Bombay, I conducted research as a Ph.D. scholar under Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, focusing on cognition-inspired NLP using eye-tracking and EEG data. I worked on key projects involving sentiment analysis, sarcasm detection, machine translation for Indian languages, and annotation complexity modeling. I also spearheaded the establishment of the Cognitive NLP Lab, securing research funding from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and IIT Bombay to equip it with state-of-the-art infrastructure. This work led to multiple publications in top NLP conferences and a Springer monograph on Cognitively Inspired NLP.
Coming from a small town with no prior research experience, CFILT was truly transformative for me. Though technically strong, I had little exposure to the operational side of research. Under Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya's mentorship and CFILT’s collaborative culture, I evolved from a raw enthusiast into a confident, independent researcher. The lab instilled in me a deep respect for scientific rigor, interdisciplinary thinking, and the power of ideas. It didn’t just shape my research -- it shaped my identity. Everything I’ve built since, from leading industrial research to establishing labs, traces back to the foundations laid at CFILT.
CFILT has played a transformative role in advancing NLP and Indian language technologies nationwide. It pioneered foundational resources like Indo/Hindi WordNet and multilingual machine translation systems, developed cutting-edge tools in cognitive NLP, and promoted interdisciplinary research combining AI, linguistics, and cognitive science. With its strong open-source ethos, national and international collaborations, and policy influence, CFILT has been instrumental in shaping India’s language AI ecosystem and empowering technological access across diverse linguistic communities.
CFILT has always stood for intellectual rigor, bold ideas, and a deep commitment to making language technologies inclusive and impactful for India. As someone who owes much of their growth to this incredible ecosystem, I encourage every student and researcher to embrace the interdisciplinary spirit, stay curious, and push boundaries fearlessly. You are part of a legacy that has not only shaped NLP in India (and worldwide) but also touched lives across linguistic and cultural divides. Keep building, keep dreaming!!! CFILT's best chapters are still being written...
Current Position: Senior Scientist at TCS Research
My first involvement with CFILT happened during my MTech project days (2007-2008). My MTech project was in Morphological Analysis and POS Tagging of Marathi. As a young researcher, it gave me an opportunity to contribute to the progress of NLP in my mother tongue. The second involvement was during 2012-2020 when I pursued my PhD as an external student while working at TCS Research. My PhD thesis investigated various techniques for entity-relationship extraction, especially joint extraction techniques. Currently, I am working as a Senior Scientist at TCS Research.
Apart from having Prof. Pushpak as my guide, I was extremely fortunate to have a friendly, supportive, and also competitive peer students group at CFILT during both my MTech and PhD years. I had the fortune of having Mitesh and Anoop as my MTech batchmates and an exciting set of fellow PhD travelers with whom I had many technical and non-technical discussions - Girish, Joe, Rudra, Raksha, Aditya, and Sandeep. Although being an external student, CFILT provided me with excellent infrastructure support including access to advanced GPU servers. I still remember attending those common meetings with Pushpak Sir and other fellow PhD students. Even though our topics were quite different, these discussions and ideations, taught me several skills necessary to be a good researcher.
CFILT's contribution to NLP and especially to Indian languages related research is immense. The breadth of research areas always has been quite vast, covering almost every aspect of NLP. The standout contribution in my opinion has been the tremendous efforts put in the creation of IndoWordNet over the years that has been an excellent resource for Indian languages.
Current Position: Associate Vice President (Data Scientist) at ISS Stoxx
Name & Position: Girishkumar Ponkiya, PhD Scholar in the Department of CSE, IIT Bombay Time Period: 2013 - 2021 Research Focus: Noun compound interpretation, dataset design, unsupervised paraphrasing Key Publications: ICON 2016, COLING 2018, LREC 2018, EMNLP 2020, ACL‑IJCNLP 2021 Also published multiple datasets. The funding source for stipend was a TRDDC project (acknowledged in peer work). Active member within CFILT (no-reason parties, managed servers, maintained website, and son on), won The Best Poster Award (Technical Category) during the first RISC. Current position: Associate Vice President (Data Scientist) at ISS Stoxx
Under Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya's guidance at CFILT, I learned to approach noun-compound interpretation and Indian‑language NLP with precision and academic rigor. His mentorship shaped the methodology and depth of my research. Girish K. Palshikar (TCS Research, TRDDC Pune) was my co-guide. He provided my PhD topic and supervised my internship, which opened doors to the practical, industry side of language technology. This experience gave me a first-hand taste of real-world NLP applications - and a firm grounding in applied research. At CFILT, I worked closely with peers like Kevin Patel, Rudra Murthy, and Diptesh Kanojia, often co-authoring papers together. Early in my PhD, discussions with Abhijit Mishra, Aditya Joshi, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Raksha Sharma, and others were truly eye-opening and contributed significantly in shaping my thinking. Engaging in internal seminars, workshops, and conference presentations at CFILT helped me polish my academic writing, hone presentation skills, and build confidence to work independently. That solid foundation later proved invaluable in my role as Data Scientist at ISS Stoxx, where I continue to apply linguistically informed NLP strategies in the industry.
At CFILT, the focus has always been on deep understanding of problem and linguistic insight; not just predictive models. This mindset shaped how researchers think -- prioritising clarity over shallow pattern learning. While not all researchers like myself worked across every language, the lab's overall multilingual fabric created a rich environment that encouraged us to think beyond language‑specific patterns. It was a culture that made multilinguality a part of one's worldview. CFILT isn't just about building datasets; it's about building them thoughtfully. They have nurtured a culture where researchers respect lexicons, corpora, WordNets, and ontologies as essential components of language understanding. That atmosphere inspired my own dataset creation efforts using a deep-rooted semantics lens. CFILT pioneered initiatives like the Hindi WordNet and IndoWordNet, and created massive parallel corpora such as the IIT Bombay English–Hindi corpus (~1.5M sentence pairs).. all shared openly to advance Indian NLP research. More importantly, CFILT ingrained in students a deep respect for linguistic resources and a community-based research spirit.
CFILT's research culture taught us to value deep linguistic understanding.. not just predictive models.. a mindset that guided my entire approach. The lab's multilingual ethos, including work across Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit and English, trained us to think beyond one language and cultivate a broader linguistic perspective. CFILT also instilled respect for lexical resources like WordNets, corpora and ontologies, encouraging us to build datasets thoughtfully and meaningfully. The lab's legacy.. from pioneering Hindi WordNet and expanding to IndoWordNet linking 18 languages, to releasing the IIT Bombay English-Hindi parallel corpus.. reflects a tradition of open, semantic-first research and generous knowledge sharing. I still remember Prof. Bhattacharyya's guidance during my PhD orientation: "tenacity is what separates a PhD from a master’s, and a master’s from a B.Tech." That advice stays with me, especially when research gets tough. My best wishes to all students, researchers and faculty -- stay curious, persist with tenacity, and carry forward the CFILT spirit of deep thinking and community collaboration.
Current Position: Senior Research Scientist - Google, Adjunct Faculty - IIT Madras, IIT Bombay
MTech student. I was a part of the ILMT project focusing on low resource machine translation and morphological analysis. I also enabled hybrid SMT and RBMT in Sampark, the RBMT system of the ILMT consortium. I also did lab infra admin duties. I'm currently a scientist in Google.
I learned the value of effort, thoroughness and mental strength. This helped me become very independent and tough. I also developed collaboration skills which helped me in my academic and teaching pursuits.
CFILTs focus on linguistics in this era of machine learning always stands out to me. Language is still a human aspect and linguistics will lead to the ultimate solution.
You have no idea how fortunate you are that you get to be mentored by Pushpak sir. He is one of the wisest researchers of our generation and his long term vision will stand the test of time.
Current Position: Principal Applied Researcher at Microsoft
I was a M.Tech student (2006-2008) when I was working on multiword expressions and the CLIA project. I was a Ph.D student (2012-1017) when I was working on machine translation, transliteration and multilingual models. During my time at CFILT, I worked on projects like Shata-anuvaadak, BrahmiNet, IndicNLP Library, TransDoop crowdsourcing for machine translation, IITB-Hindi Parallel corpus amongst others. Currently, I am a Principal Applied Researcher at Microsoft India, working with the Machine Translation and Azure AI Core teams.
The lab has a great peer group, with many students working on various aspects. This was very helpful for engaging discussions. During a Ph.D, most students work in silos - the peer group helped with discussions and support. The sense of mission for Indian language NLP that the lab has infused in students has gone beyond my term at CFILT and has become my long-term research mission. I am sure it is the same for many others, and some of us came together to continue this mission for Indian language NLP which has been very fruitful. The external collaborations helped make connects with various NLP stakeholders in India and abroad. Particularly, the collaboration with various institutes on consortia projects helped maked long-term connects and collaborations. The collaboration with Kyoto University was also very fruitful, and the collaboration with Kyoto University has continued for a long time. The opportunities to present work at different avenues helped me sharpen my presentation skills and I began presenting and teaching. Pushpak Sir has been a great mentor - his calm demeanour and focus on fundamentals is something that stands out. He gives students the right amount of balance between exploration and staying focused on a goal - which I think is very important for a Ph.D student.
CFILT has brought Indian language NLP to the centerstage by creating a hub for Indian language NLP research, through thought-leadership, collaborations and very useful and pioneering deliverables like IndoWordNet, important research and resources on machine translation, sentiment analysis, sarcasm detection, word sense disambiguation and novel areas like eye-tracking studies amongst others. CFILT has always looked to combine theoretical/linguistic insights with data-driven approaches for optimal solutions to Indian NLP problems. CFILT has trained many NLP researchers and practitioners who have gone on to make a mark in industry and academia as well as contributing to Indian language NLP. CFILT is a major, well-recognized talent hub for NLP. CFILT has thus been central to driving development of Indian language NLP.
I would like to congratulate CFILT on this significant milestone full of achievements and contributions. Special congratulations and thanks to Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya who has built up the institution and to all the faculty and mentors who have enriched it. I am honoured to be part of this journey and look forward to continue association with CFILT. Wishing CFILT a great future!
Current Position: Assistant professor at IIIT Hyderabad
2003-2014, PhD + part of ILMT Project + managed EILMT project 2012-2014, Currently Assistant professor at IIIT Hyderabad
Working in the largest NLP lab in India provided a huge breadth of knowledge and exposure to all aspects of NLP for Indian Languages. The insistence on linking Linguistics and Computational aspects has shaped the way I think about NLP research.
CFILT's vision (IMO) has been to bring the best of ML, Linguistics and Computation together for the betterment of NLP in India. The approach does not put any one point-of-view ahead of the other and approaches differing streams of thought with the right amount of deference and acceptance. Indian NLP is richer, brighter and more adventurous thanks to the guidance of Prof. Pushpak and the environment provided at CFILT.
A heartfelt thanks to the Pillars of CFILT: Gajanan ji, Deepak ji, Sushma ji and many others. You make the students feel at home. You made our lives easier and much more enjoyable. Beyond the obvious benefits of PB sir's tutelage, your friendship made the time spent there truly memorable.
Current Position: Staff Research Scientist at IBM India Pvt Ltd
2013-2020 PhD Student in the area of Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Staff Research Scientist at IBM India Pvt Ltd
When I joined the CFILT lab, I was driven by a passion to contribute to Indian languages, but I had very little exposure to NLP and almost no research experience. Working with my advisor, Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, was a truly transformative experience. His mentorship not only shaped my research skills, but also deeply influenced my approach to problem-solving and mentoring others. The environment at CFILT was incredibly inclusive and supportive. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the guidance and encouragement of my mentor and my seniors. I am especially grateful to my senior Sudha, who not only made my initial days as a PhD student comfortable and welcoming, but also had a way of encouraging me with words that quietly strengthened my resolve. I would also like to thank Anoop, whose mentorship during the later stages of my PhD helped me grow as a researcher, and Dhirendra, for the many stimulating linguistic discussions we shared. The senior PhD students at CFILT were approachable, collaborative, and always willing to help, which had a lasting impact on me. I am thankful to my colleagues Girish, Diptesh, Raksha, Aditya, and Abhijit for creating a research environment that fostered open collaboration and the free exchange of ideas. I am also grateful to the technical staff-Irawati Kulkarni, Nileshji, Jaya madam, Lata madam, and Gajananji-whose immense linguistic knowledge enriched my understanding and from whom I learned a great deal through our discussions. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable support of Sushma madam and Deepakji, whose help ensured a smooth and positive working environment.
CFILT has firmly established itself as the premier research group in the field of NLP for Indian languages. It would be difficult to talk about the progress of Indian language technologies without acknowledging CFILT's significant contributions. The Indian NLP community owes a great deal to the group for consistently pushing the boundaries and setting high standards in this domain. I feel genuinely proud if, in any small way, I was able to contribute to CFILT’s ongoing efforts in advancing NLP for Indian languages.
Being part of the CFILT community has been an honour and a transformative experience. I urge all current students and researchers to make the most of the incredible opportunities that come with being part of such a pioneering group. Carry the legacy forward by advancing Indian language NLP and aiming for impactful publications in top conferences and journals. I extend my heartfelt thanks to every faculty member who has been part of the CFILT journey—their vision, mentorship, and dedication have laid the foundation for everything the lab has achieved today. CFILT wouldn’t be where it is without their unwavering support and contributions.
Current Position: Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft India (R&D)
PhD Scholar; June 2014 - March 2022; Study on lower bounds for Embedding Dimensions, Model Explainability; Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft India (R&D)
Inclusiveness and the importance of making everyone comfortable from Hanumantji, Sudha and Girish; Exceptionalism and professionalism from the Big Three - Aditya Joshi, Abhijit Mishra and Anoop Kunchukuttan; Never give up attitude from Diptesh, Rudra and Joe. While almost all of us carried these attributes, I have highlighted the ones who stood out for those attributes. These, coupled with the inherent thirst for knowledge and clarity, and the tenacity of a PhD student, are essential to have to be a good individual contributor, team player, mentor, and leader in the industry. There have been many instances over my career so far, where my team might be facing a (supposedly) tough situation, and my opinion is "Seen similar situation, and know how to tackle it" just because of the environment this lab provided. And ofcourse, this wouldn't have been made possible without Pushpak sir, from whom, all of the above trickles down into each one of us.
One word - Trailblazer. For the better part of its existence, CFILT has been synonymous with Indian Language NLP. Even now, amongst the plethora of avenues for Indian NLP, many have their roots in CFILT. The clarity regarding the language barrier in a highly multilingual country and the need to break this barrier, is in my opinion, a highly practical and ground impact oriented vision (as opposed to many idealistic visions out there). And the approach, might I add, was truly Indian - Start solving the problem with whatever resources we have, and keep iterating and improving as we get better and have better resources. This is evident in WordNet projects, eye-tracking annotated data, GPU-intensive resources and solutions. The fact that research published in major avenues and cited more than tens of thousands of times, deliverables from these projects still widely used all over the world, alumni from the lab working at the forefront of the field in both academia and industry is a testament to CFILT's legacy.
For students and researchers: Congratulations! You are now part of something amazing. Make the best use of it. Use compute resources available to you efficiently. Reach out to professors and mentors for help and guidance. Collaborate with your peers; don't compete. There is a whole world out there to compete against. Better to face the world as a team rather than an individual. Make an awesome career. I have had colleagues from other labs, who did not have an environment and culture like CFILT's. I have seen PhD students from those labs struggle a lot. Whenever I see them, I consider myself lucky. And so are you. So please make the best use of it. For faculty: Congratulations to Pushpak sir, Malhar sir and other faculty members for this milestone! I would really love to sit with you (with a few cups of tea), and hear the "journey" in your own words. One feedback: in a couple of my recent visits, it felt like the collaboration amongst lab peers had declined. It might be a misread, but I felt it a bit. Hence raising the issue.
Current Position: Associate Professor, IIT Roorkee
2012 - 2017, PhD Research Scholar in the Department of CSE, IIT Bombay Notabld Contributions: As part of CFILT, we worked on recognizing properties of words which can infulence Sentiment Analysis. We developed a mechanism to automatically identify sentiment bearing words and generate a sentiment lexicon from an annotated corpus. We also prove the hypothesis that intensity of the polar word is a key contributor in sentiment of the sentence. We worked for English and Hindi langauges. Key Publications on the work: IJCNLP 2013, EMNLP 2015, EMNLP 2017, ACL 2018
I was part of CFILT from January 2012 till November 2017. It had an excellent research environment, created and nurtured by Pushpak Sir. I would like to highlight two key aspects of CFILT’s research culture: Timely execution of ideas and sharing results – I learned that every aspect of research, including failures, is worth sharing. Failures are important milestones that eventually lead to success. Weekly meetings with Pushpak Sir – These meetings gave me the feeling that one should enjoy the process of learning; publications and results are natural by-products. Pushpak Sir often reminded us: “If you are not getting any clue about how to proceed further, read the data.” I had many such experiences that shaped me into a better researcher, academician, and supervisor. When I was uncertain about a research hypothesis, Rajita Ma’am and Jaya Ma’am (both linguists) played a key role in giving me the confidence to pursue it. That very hypothesis eventually resulted in two EMNLP papers. My friends and co-researchers at CFILT—Aditya, Sudha, Kevin, Girish, Rudra, Dhirendra, Sandhya Ma’am, Arjun, Hanumant, Anup, and Abhijeet—contributed to a truly fabulous learning environment. There was almost no possibility of negative emotions toward one another. I would heartily congratulate Pushpak Sir for laying the foundation of such a positive and enriching environment. I also remember many incidents when Sushma Ji, Deepak Ji, and Gajanan Ji went out of their way to help us complete paperwork on time, minimizing our involvement. Looking back, those five years at CFILT remain a cherished part of my life. I am now trying to carry forward the legacy I inherited from Pushpak Sir here at IIT Roorkee.
CFILT’s vision was guided by Pushpak Sir, who believed that all Indian languages hold equal importance. He emphasized that we can honor them by generating data and developing tools that embody knowledge of these languages.
I wish CFILT retains the research and learning environment that I witnessed during my PhD, and continues to pass it on to future generations of CFILT.
Current Position: Scientist, Deep Learning and AI Research Area, TCS Research
PhD student (2017-2022), Neural Machine Translation Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation
The research environment in the lab is very good and collaborative. As a teaching assistant, I got to learn how to teach, make the environment more collaborative, evaluating without being very focused on theory, and team work. As a researcher I learnt a lot with respect to guiding students, team work, how to make a idea into reality, the complete process of research can be very overwhelming (Professor Pushpak very calmly teaches us how to go through it), I do remember one line from him when nothing was working from my work "He mentioned, if this happens it means you are on right path". Which has always helped me being motivated when something is not working.
It is all open source. CFILT contributed a lot to NLP for Indian languages.
The lab has grown a lot even from the time I was there. It has good students, and faculty members who are continuosly working hard. All the best.
Current Position: Vice-Assistant Manager, FinTech LLM @ Rakuten, Tokyo, Japan
Time Period at CFILT: 2011–2018 I was part of CFILT during my PhD, and those years remain among the most formative of my life. The lab’s culture—nurtured by Pushpak Sir—instilled in me the importance of rigor, persistence, and clarity in research. Weekly discussions and mentorship helped me appreciate that failures are not setbacks but essential steps toward stronger ideas. My research focused on enriching Indian language WordNets, developing visualization tools, and advancing unsupervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) for Hindi and Marathi. At times when I felt uncertain about a research hypothesis, the guidance of Laxmi Ma’am, Rajita Ma’am, and Jaya Ma’am gave me the confidence to pursue it—leading to important publications. Equally memorable was the camaraderie with my peers—Rudra, Dhirendra, Hanumant, Raksha, Kevin, Sandhya Ma’am, Joe, Arjun, Anoop, Abhijeet, and many others—who created a vibrant, collaborative atmosphere where learning and sharing were valued above competition. The culture was so positive that there was hardly any room for negativity. For this, I sincerely congratulate Pushpak Sir for laying the foundation of such an enriching and inspiring environment.
My years at CFILT were truly formative. The lab’s vibrant research culture, with its mix of rigorous discussions and practical focus, nurtured my curiosity and strengthened my problem-solving skills. Mentorship from faculty and senior researchers went beyond academics, shaping my persistence, clarity, and research outlook. The collaborative spirit—working with peers on diverse NLP projects—taught me the value of teamwork and interdisciplinary thinking. These experiences laid a strong foundation that continues to guide my career, influencing how I approach challenges and create real-world impact. CFILT remains an enduring source of inspiration in my professional journey.
CFILT has been a true pioneer in advancing NLP for Indian languages, building foundational resources and systems while nurturing a strong community of researchers. Its vision of combining linguistic depth with computational innovation has left a lasting legacy in making language technologies inclusive and impactful.
To the current CFILT community—congratulations on this milestone! You are part of a lab with a proud legacy of pioneering work in NLP and Indian language technologies. Cherish the collaborative spirit, embrace curiosity, and continue pushing boundaries. Your research will shape the future of inclusive and impactful technologies.
Current Position:ML consultant at Sony research
I was a Ph.D. student at CFILT from July 2016 to March 2023 under the guidance of Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya. My thesis focused on Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation: An English-Indic Case Study, and involved work on language models, subword segmentation, and cross-lingual embeddings. Later, I also contributed to a healthcare-AI project on multimodal information extraction from clinical data. I enjoyed maintaining the lab website for a brief period, an experience that allowed me to witness the lab’s growing visibility and success.
Meetings with Pushpak Sir sharpened my critical thinking and taught me how to identify blind spots, while the systematic work culture instilled in me the habit of planning and execution. Discussions with Rudra gave me courage and technical clarity whenever I doubted myself. I also cherish the warmth of friends like Jyotsana, Girish, Sandhya Ma’am, Kevin, and Hanumanth, and even Poulomi, Narjis, Sravanthi, Raksha and Sudha, despite our brief time together, made CFILT feel like family. I am deeply grateful to Sushma Ma’am, Lata Ma’am, Deepak Ji, and Gajanan Ji for going beyond official paperwork support, often helping with personal matters as well, and to everyone who took on responsibilities that helped us grow stronger.
For me, CFILT has always stood out as a pioneer in Indian language NLP long before the field gained global attention. What makes the lab truly special is its unique balance between linguistics and computation, its methodical and practical approach to research, and a well-defined structure with clear rules. The collective effort of everyone, combined with Pushpak Sir’s strong yet fair leadership, makes CFILT an ideal place to prepare oneself, both intellectually and professionally.
Treasure the supportive and systematic culture of CFILT. Do not be afraid of failures, you learn from these incidents. The habits and friendships you build here will stay with you far beyond your Ph.D. years.
Current Position:Senior Lecturer at the University of Surrey, UK
Diptesh Kanojia is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Surrey, UK, where he started as a Postdoctoral Associate in 2021. At CFILT, transitioned from role to role starting with multiple Research Intern roles from 2011 to 2013, to a Research Engineer in 2013, a PhD student in 2016, and graduating his PhD in 2021. He spent 10 years acquiring skills in research, development, and systems administration, and contributed to research collaborations with multiple PhD students from CFILT. He contributed to projects like EILMT and IndoWordnet. He was able to work on multiple research sub-areas like sentiment, sarcasm, gaze tracking and cross-lingual similarity for low-resource languages. His major contribution is laying the groundwork for CFILT development and deployment servers over this decade, ensuring a smooth working environment and transition of multiple student batches, including the unfortunate COVID era.
The research environment at CFILT helped him grow into a researcher given the excellent mentorship provided by senior PhD colleagues like Aditya, Abhijit, and Anoop. Under the guidance of Prof. Pushpak, he was able to publish at many international venues and build an academic career path. Beyond research mentorship, the administrators and linguists at CFILT played a pivotal role in shaping his academic journey. The constant support of the admin team, especially Deepak ji, ensured a seamless working environment for students and researchers. He also fondly recalls the invaluable lessons from the amazing linguists who not only introduced him to the nuances of linguistics but also instilled in him a deep appreciation for the interdisciplinary nature of NLP. He still enjoys collaborating with students @ CFILT, and revels in the collaborative culture kept alive by the likes of Sourabh.
CFILT’s contribution to NLP and Indian language technologies is its vision of advancing research while staying grounded in societal impact. From projects like IndoWordnet to cutting-edge work in machine translation, gaze tracking, parsing, and resource creation for Indian languages, CFILT has been at the forefront of addressing the unique challenges of multilingual and low-resource contexts. The lab has fostered a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together computer scientists, linguists, and industry/domain experts to create sustainable resources and systems that have benefited not just academia but also the larger community. Our legacy lies in training several generations of researchers who carry forward this ethos worldwide, and in setting a benchmark for how computational innovation, resource development, and linguistic insight can go hand-in-hand to shape the future of NLP for Indian languages.
To the current CFILT community, I would say: enjoy the spirit and curiosity-driven culture that defines this lab. CFILT stands out for its ability to combine deep linguistic insights with computational innovation, and this strength will continue to be crucial as NLP evolves with language models and multilingual AI. Take pride in building upon the foundations laid by Prof. Pushpak over the years, and don’t hesitate to explore new directions. Most importantly, remember that the friendships, mentorship, and teamwork you experience here will stay with you much beyond your time at the lab.