Dr Aditya Joshi
Senior Lecturer
- PhD, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India and Monash University, Australia (jointly awarded). Thesis title: 'Investigations in Computational Sarcasm' [Monograph], 2018
- MTech (Computer Science and Engineering), IIT Bombay. Dissertation title: 'Adaptation of Sentiment Analysis to a New Text Form', 2011
Engineering
Computer Science and Engineering
I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science & Engineering at UNSW. I head the natural language processing (NLP) research group within the school.
Research: As of June 2026, my papers have 3600+ citations (h-index: 27; Google Scholar), and I have been a chief investigator in grants with a cumulative total of A$6M+, including Defence Trailblazer and Google grants as a lead CI, and NHMRC (Ideas), DSTG (ASCA) and AEA (Ignite) as a CI. My publications are in conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, IJCNLP, WWW, COLING, AAAI, and Interspeech, and in journals such as ACM Computing Surveys and PLOS One. I have been acknowledged as an outstanding reviewer at ICML, ACL and EACL. I have presented tutorials at EMNLP, AACL, ALTA and ICON. My 2018 TEDx talk 'Detecting sarcasm, combating hate' interleaved my PhD thesis with my personal journey.
Teaching: I designed and introduced a new NLP course at UNSW in 2024, which has grown three times in class size with outstanding student feedback. The course is based on a textbook I co-authored with Late Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, published by Wiley in 2023. I also teach foundational computer science courses (Data Structures and Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence) in the school.
Service: I serve on the Executive Committee of Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA), the key NLP body in Australia and the region. I also serve on the Executive Committee of Mid-career Academic Network (MCAN) at UNSW. I have been Demonstrations Chair (Interspeech 2026), Publicity Chair (AACL 2026), Program Chair (ALTA 2025), Sponsorship Chair (AACL 2025) among others. I was a co-lead of the Community of Practice for Inclusive Research with Queer, Trans & people with variations of sex characteristics at UNSW from 2024-2025. I was the organizing chair for 'Rainbow AI': a workshop to support queer students in Australia interested in HDR and research careers in AI. The workshop was funded by Google's exploreCSR grant. I have also delivered masterclasses and talks to diverse audiences: high school students in Greater Sydney, Judges and judicial officers all over Australia and AI teams of tech companies, in addition to traditional research venues.
Past Experience: I also have over five years of industry experience in applying NLP techniques to various domains, such as online employment marketplace, meeting analytics and epidemic intelligence. I obtained a joint PhD degree from IIT Bombay (India) and Monash University (Australia) in 2018, and a best PhD thesis award by IITB-Monash Research Academy. Before joining UNSW in 2023, I worked as a data scientist at SEEK, a market leader in online employment marketplaces, and as a machine learning engineer at Notiv, a startup that provides AI-powered meeting insights, and a senior data scientist at Fractal, a leader in analytics. In these roles, I developed and deployed recommender systems, land natural language understanding systems, using state-of-the-art tools and frameworks, such as Azure Databricks, Atlassian Suite, and PyTorch. I have also worked as a lead trainer at the Institute of Data, that offers data science certifications to industry professionals.
E-mail
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
| Topic (Role) | Funding organisation | Name of Funding program | Co-PIs | Amount |
| ROSITA: Multimodal LLM | DSTG | ASCA 2026 | Prof. Flora Salim, Prof. Salil Kanhere, Dr. Rahat Masood (UNSW) | ~3M AUD |
| Comprehensive Defence Data Platform (Lead CI) | Defence Trailblazer | Defence Trailblazer 2025 | Prof. Flora Salim (UNSW) | 1.4M AUD |
| SENTIWATCH: Developing real-time sentiment analysis and disinformation warning using artificial intelligence within the EPIWATCH® AI epidemic alert system (CI) | AEA Ignite | AEA Ignite 2025 | Prof. Raina MacIntyre (UNSW) et al | 500K AUD |
| User-centred design and testing of a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot to address language barriers in Emergency Department Triage (CI) | NHMRC | NHMRC Ideas 2025 | Dr. Padmanesan Narasimhan (UNSW) et al | 980K AUD |
| A benchmark for sentiment and sarcasm classification for dialects of English (Lead CI) | Google Research | Google exploreCSR 2024 | Dr. Diptesh Kanojia (Uni of Surrey, UK) | 92K AUD |
| Fake news detection in the context of national security policy (Lead CI) | UNSW Global | Global Research and Innovation Program (GRIP) 2023 | Profs. Sanjay Jha, Salil Kanhere (UNSW) | 20K AUD |
| LGBTI+ inclusion in AI (Lead CI) | Google Research | Google exploreCSR 2023 | Dr. Ben Hutchinson (Google) | 51K AUD |
Recent internal grants:
-Faculty of Engineering - Diversifying Visitors to UNSW (2026)
- Faculty of Engineering - Gateway Schools Program (2026)
- UNSW Global - Global Research & Innovation Partnership (2024)
Contract Research:
- FrontierSI: A$54K. (with Prof. Flora Salim)
-NSW Department of Education: A$5K (Solo)
Paper Awards: (Stale list)
- Best PhD Thesis (2018) awarded by IITB-Monash Research Academy
- Best Paper at ACM FAccT 2023 in June 2023. (Collaborative paper by multiple authors at Queer in AI)
- Best Paper at MoMM 2020 in December 2020. (Lead author was a PhD student at Macquarie University, Sydney, who was co-supervised by me).
- Best Student Paper - Runner Up at ALTA 2019 in December 2019. (Lead author was a PhD Student at RMIT, Melbourne.)
- Best Paper from IITB-Monash Research Academy consecutively in 2015 and 2014.
Presentations: (Stale list)
- Best Sprint Thesis Talk (Senior Researcher category) at RISC 2016, Research symposium organized by Department of CSE, IIT Bombay in April 2016.
- Best 3-Minute Thesis Talk Awards at IITB-Monash Research Academy in 2015 and 2014.
- Best Poster, IBM Research Day, Dept. of CSE, IIT Bombay in August 2015.
- Invited speaker, VAIBHAV Summit organised by the Government of India, 2020.
Other: (Stale list)
- First place in the shared task on vaccination behaviour detection at SMM4H workshop at EMNLP 2018 in October 2018.
- Tata Consulting Services Research Scholar Fellowship in 2013.
I have worked in several problems of natural language processing (NLP) and This includes research as well as industry outputs. Our current research focuses on foundational, applied and inclusive NLP (the three are not necessarily disjoint categories).
Foundational: My foundational research covers improved methods for classification, attention computation, etc.
Inclusive: My research focus is on improving NLP for language varieties spanning national dialects (Australian English, Indian English, etc.), domain-specific language (defence experts and medical professionals) and accessibility (people with speech difficulties). We develop new datasets, methodologies and applications to enhance LLMs for language varieties. A significant portion of my current research is making NLP models robust for varieties of English, which aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goal "Reduce inequalities".
Applied: I work on NLP applications to several fields: defence, medicine (epidemic intelligence, clinical conversations), cybersecurity, and LGBTI inclusion.
Media:
1. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/are-you-joking-mate-ai-doesnt-get-sarcasm-in-non-american-varieties-of-english-254986 . 2025.
2. ABC Radio. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sundayextra/ai-and-sarcasm-aditya-joshi/105682208 . 2025.
3. Herald Sun. https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/experts-analyse-tweets-for-signs-of-health-complaints/news-story/0cc8a85580fb9660887877c5570f532d?btr=081a2214bf68b36e67d890685d6b9450 . 2019.
4. Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai-news/didn-t-get-the-jibe-this-program-by-iit-b-researchers-could-help-you/story-8PQzpfUYu18DM6ICufIs5N.html . 2018.
5. The Times of London. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ai-can-struggle-to-detect-sarcasm-vprkpdfxl 2018.
6. Indian Express. http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/iit-bombay-team-creates-program-to-detect-drunk-text-message-writers . 2015.
Service:
- Demonstration Chair, Interspeech 2026.
- Publicity Chair, AACL-IJCNLP 2026.
- Selection Committee Member, ACM India Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2025. [link]
- Program Co-Chair, Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) Annual Workshop, 2025. [link]
- Executive Committee Member, Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA), 2025 onwards. [link]
- arXiv moderator, cs.CL, 2025 onwards. [link]
- Sponsorship Chair, AACL-IJCNLP 2025, December 2025. [link]
- Track Chair (AI & Cybersecurity), BuildSec 2024, December 2024.
- Volunteer, CSIRO's STEM Professionals in School, 2018-2019.
Tutorials:
- `Connecting Ideas in Lower-Resource Scenarios: NLP for national Varieties, Creoles and other low resource languages', COLING, Abu Dhabi, UAE, January 2025. (Co-speakers: Heather Lent, Diptesh Kanojia, Haiyue Song, Hour Kaing)
- `NLP for Healthcare in the Absence of a Healthcare Dataset', AACL, Suzhou, China, December 2020. (Co-speaker: Sarvnaz Karimi)
- `NLP for Healthcare in the Absence of a Healthcare Dataset', ALTA, Sydney, Australia, December 2019. (Co-speaker: Sarvnaz Karimi)
- `Computational Sarcasm', presented at \textbf{EMNLP} 2017, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2017. (Co-speaker: Pushpak Bhattacharyya)
Non-conference talks:
- 'Introduction to LLMs and NLP', Multiple talks at NSW Supreme Court Conference, WA Magistrates Conference and 'AI and the Courts Symposium' all organised by the National Judicial College of Australia, 2024
- 'NLP for varieties of English', Standup comedy talk at Sydney Fringe Festival, 2024.
- `Language of the Queer in India' at the `Queer in AI' social at NAACL, 2021.
- `Social media-based epidemic intelligence' in the panel on `NLP for social good' at the VAIBHAV summit (Vaishwik Bharatiya Vaigyanik) summit organised by the Government of India, 2020.
- `Detecting Sarcasm, Combating Hate', TEDx talk at TEDxSomaiyaVidyavihar, an independently organised TEDx event, Mumbai, India, 2018.
- `Detecting sarcasm using incongruity', invited speaker at WASSA workshop at EMNLP 2017, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2017.
Posters:
- `Computational Sarcasm', Google NLP Summit organized by Google Zurich, September 2017.
- `Sarcasm Detection' and `Drunk-Texting Prediction', Research Colloqium, XRCI Open 2016 organized by Xerox Research Center India, Bengaluru, January 2016.
- `Sarcasm Technology', IBM Research Day 2015 organized by IBM Research Lab, Bengaluru, August 2015.
- `Sentiment Annotation Complexity', Microsoft TechVista 2015 organized by Microsoft Research India, Bengaluru, January 2015.
Panel Discussions:
- Panelist in a discussion on `Integrating ChatGPT in Education' organized by EdTech IIT Bombay, Mumbai, 2023. (Online event)
- Panelist in a discussion on `Achieving better health through AI' organized by Venture Cafe Sydney in Macquarie Park, Sydney, 2019.
- Panelist in a discussion on `AI in India: Today and Tomorrow' at Data Science Day organized by Web \& Coding Club at IIT Bombay, Mumbai, 2018.
My Research Supervision
As a primary supervisor:
1. Amrita Singh, AI-driven legal contract understanding, (co-supervisors: Helen Paik and Jiaojiao Jiang)
2. Duc Anh Nguyen, NLP for ancient languages (co-supervisor: Mira Kim)
3. Charles Wyatt, Multi-token prediction in language models (co-supervisor: Flora Salim)
4. Yiyang Liu, Narrative understanding using language models (co-supervisors: Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson, Paul Dawson)
5. Dipankar Srirag, Triage classification in emergency departments for Arabic first language (co-supervisors: Salil Kanhere, Padmanesan Narasimhan)
6. Sicheng Jin, Transcription for speakers with communication difficulties (co-supervisor: Beena Ahmed)
7. Haokai Zhao. Personalisation of language models. (co-supervisors: Benjamin Tag, Flora Salim)
8. Siddharth Johri. Suppressed objectives during model training. (co-supervisor: Elvira Soji)
9. Chenlu Ju. LLMs for urban planning. (co-supervisor: Devin Hua et al)
As a joint/secondary supervisor:
1. Rashini Liyanarachchi, Multimodal music emotion recognition (co-supervisor: Erik Meiering)
2. Ziyu Yang, Fake news detection (co-supervisor: Jiaojiao Jiang, Xin Cao) (Completed)
3. Ali Almutairi, Few-label classification (co-supervisors: Gelareh Mohammedi et al)
4. Frank Tran, Pharmaceautical compliance using LLMs. (co-supervisors: Helen Paik, Salil Kanhere)
5. Ahmad Naghim. Game-playing. (co-supervisor: Michael Thielscher)
Taste-of-Research students:
1. Zhewen Shen. Child language acquisition-inspired post-training. (Co-supervisor: Ruey-Cheng Chen, Canva) (Published at SumEval workshop at COLING 2025)
2. Fai Chan. Hate speech detection towards LGBTI+ community. (Co-supervisor: Duc Anh Nguyen) (Published at ALTA 2025)
3. Suhan Karaca. Legal NLP. (Co-supervisor: Amrita Singh) (Published at CustomisableNLP workshop at ACL 2026)
4. Quang Pham. Simultaneous machine translation. (Co-supervisor: Dipankar Srirag). (Ongoing)
5. Ishmanbir Singh. Explainable sarcasm detection for dialects of English. (Co-supervisor: Dipankar Srirag) (Published at ALTA 2026; Best Paper - Honorable Mention)
I also have the privilege of supervising incredibly talented Masters and undergraduate students, research assistants, software engineers and postdoctoral fellows at UNSW.
My Teaching
Course Convener and Lecturer:
- 2025 Term 3: Data Structures and Algorithms (COMP9024) - Postgraduate
- 2025 Term 1: Natural Language Processing (COMP6713)- Undergraduate/Postgraduate
- 2024 Term 3: Artificial Inteligence (COMP9414) - Postgraduate
- 2024 Term 1: Natural Language Processing (COMP6713) - Undergraduate/Postgraduate (New Course; Design & Delivery)
- 2023 Term 3: Data Structures and Algorithms (COMP9024) - Postgraduate