Debarati Das

I am a part of the IDEAS Research group led by Scott Counts, where I work on measuring and steering the impact of Generative AI on Productivity.
During my PhD, I was a member of the Minnesota NLP group led by Prof. Dongyeop Kang and was co-supervised by Prof. Jaideep Srivastava, who leads the Data Mining and Research Group (DMR) at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Previously, I have interned at Microsoft Research and 3M R&D. Before completing my PhD, I earned my Master’s degree at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where I worked on applying NLP to online social media analysis.
My research sits at the intersection of natural language processing and computational social science, with a focus on designing and evaluating large language models (LLMs) in human-centered, high-stakes contexts. I’m especially interested in how LLMs can support expert decision-making by participating in structured and interpretable workflows. Alongside that, I work on characterizing the generative behavior of LLMs, with an emphasis on understanding how their outputs align (or misalign) with users’ values, expectations, and goals. This includes applications like email personalization, task delegation, and other AI-augmented workplace tools where trust, intent matching, and social nuance are essential.
I’m excited about building modular, accountable NLP systems that not only generate fluent text but also support meaningful human–AI collaboration in real-world environments.
news
Aug 20, 2025 | 🥳 Our PATHs paper is accepted to EMNLP 2025! See you in Suzhou, China :) |
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Jul 07, 2025 | 🥳LawFlow is accepted to COLM 2025! See you in Montreal :) |
Apr 30, 2025 | ✅ LawFlow, which captures lawyers’ end-to-end thought processes, is out on ArXiv! |
Dec 15, 2024 | 🎤 Gave a talk titled “When AI learns to Listen: Generative AI in the Social Sciences” to high school students for the Sparkway Learning PythonAI Workshop 2024. |
Nov 04, 2024 | 🎤 Honored to be a speaker at the Women in AI and DS Conference 2024 and discussed the impact of artifacts in LLM-generated data with an incredibly talented crowd! |
Oct 08, 2024 | 🏆 I received the 2024 AnitaB.org Advancing Inclusion scholarship! |
Jul 21, 2024 | 🥳 Our paper “Publics’ Perceptions of Legitimacy in Corporate Social Advocacy: A Computational Analysis of the Influence of Ideological Congruence” is published in Public Relations Review |
Jul 18, 2024 | 🎤 Gave a talk titled “Beyond Words: Incorporating Graph Data into LLMs for Comprehensive Social System Analysis” at IC2S2 2024! P.S The cheesesteak is just fantastic at Philadelphia 🤤 |
Jun 16, 2024 | ✅ Presented my paper “Which Modality should I use – Text, Motif, or Image? : Understanding Graphs with Large Language Models” at NAACL 2024 in Mexico City! [Tweet] |
Jun 06, 2024 | 🥳I am thrilled to be interning at Microsoft Research this summer! |