Anurag Acharya, PhD
Email: anurag [dot] acharya [at] pnnl [dot] gov | Google Scholar
I am a Research Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Earlier, I was an Adjunct Faculty at FIU's Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences. My research interests are in the broad fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), specifically Computational Linguistics, Large Language Models (LLMs), Foundational and Generative Models, Reasoning. I am also deeply interested in AI evaluation, safety, and bias, and ways to build safe and trustworthy AI.
I received my PhD in Computer Science from Florida International University (FIU) in 2022 under the supervision of Professor Mark A. Finlayson. During my PhD, I did an internship at PNNL, and started as an Adjunct Faculty at FIU towards the end of my PhD, continuing on until Spring 2023. I received my MS in Computer Science from FIU in 2021. Before attending FIU, I had a BE in Computer Engineering and a BA in English and Political Science from Tribhuvan University.
Publications
- [Book Chapter] Saldanha E., Acharya A., Ocal, M., Glenski M., & Volkova, S. 2025. "Detecting and Summarizing Narratives in the Information Environment: A Case Study of Misinformation and Disinformation Campaigns." In Detecting Online Propaganda and Misinformation. Edited by Last, Litvak & Lin. World Scientific.
- [Paper] Chaturvedi, S., Acharya, A., Meyur, R., Hayashi, K., Munikoti, S., & Horawalavithana, Y. S. 2025. "Evaluating the Robustness of Dense Retrievers in Interdisciplinary Domains." In The KDD Workshop on Evaluation and Trustworthiness of Agentic and Generative AI Models, ACM KDD 2025. Toronto, Canada.
- [Paper] Meyur, R., Phan, H., Hayashi, K., Stewart, I., Sharma, S., Chaturvedi, S., Parker, M., Nally, D., Montgomery, S., Jannesari, A., Pazdernik, K., Halappanavar, M., Munikoti, S., Horawalavithana, Y. S., & Acharya, A. 2025. "Benchmarking LLMs for Environmental Review and Permitting." In The Workshop on Large Language Models for Scientific and Societal Advances, ACM KDD 2025. Toronto, Canada.
- [Paper] Meyur, R., Phan, H., Wagle, S., Strube, J., Halappanavar, M., Horawalavithana, Y. S., Acharya, A., & Munikoti, S. 2025. "WeQA: A Benchmark for Retrieval Augmented Generation in Wind Energy domain." In Fourth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact, The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). Vienna, Austria.
- [Paper] Wagle, S., Munikoti, S., Meyur, R., Whiting, J. M., Farr, H. K., Acharya, A., Horawalavithana, Y. S., Halappanavar, M., Strube, J., Fierce, L. M. 2025. "Leveraging Multimodal AI for Efficient Data Discovery in Wind Energy Research." In ACM Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing Conference. Columbus, Ohio.
- [Paper] Stam, C., Saldanha, E. G., Halappanavar, M. & Acharya, A. 2025. "Leveraging Language Modeling and Dynamic Social Network Analysis to recognize Patterns in the Spread of COVID-19 Misinformation Narratives on Social Media." In Social Development through NLP-driven Interdisciplinary Collaborations (SocioNLP) Workshop, 18th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA). Corfu, Greece.
- [Paper] Munikoti, S., Acharya, A., Wagle, S., & Horawalavithana, Y. S. "Evaluating the Effectiveness of Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models in Scientific Document Reasoning". 2024. In Fourth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2024), The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). Bangkok, Thailand.
- [Paper] Acharya, A., Castro-Estrada, D., Dahal, S., Yarlott, W. V. H., Gomez, D., & Finlayson, M. A. 2024. "Discovering Implicit Meanings of Cultural Motifs from Text". In Sixth Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS), 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2024). Mexico City, Mexico.
- [Paper] Yarlott, W. V. H., Acharya, A., Castro-Estrada, D., Gomez, D., & Finlayson, M. A. 2024. "GOLEM: GOld standard for Learning and Evaluation of Motifs". In The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (COLING-LREC). Turin, Italy.
- [Paper] Munikoti, S., Acharya, A., Wagle, S., & Horawalavithana, Y. S. 2024. "ATLANTIC: Structure-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Language Model for Interdisciplinary Science". In Workshop on AI to Accelerate Science and Engineering, The Thirty-Eighth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Vancouver, Canada.
- [Paper] Wagle, S., Munikoti, S., Acharya, A., Smith, S., & Horawalavithana, Y. S. 2024. "Empirical evaluation of Uncertainty Quantification in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models for Science". In Workshop on AI to Accelerate Science and Engineering, The Thirty-Eighth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Vancouver, Canada.
- [Paper] Yarlott, W. V. H., Ochoa, A., Acharya, A., Bobrow, L., Castro-Estrada, D., Gomez, D., Zheng, J., McDonald, D., Miller, C. & Finlayson, M. A. 2021. "Finding Trolls Under Bridges: Preliminary Work on a Motif Detector". Advances in Cognitive Systems. Virtual Conference.
- [Citable Abstract] Yarlott, W. V. H., Ochoa, A., Acharya, A., Bobrow, L., Castro-Estrada, D., Gomez, D., Zheng, J., McDonald, D., Miller, C. & Finlayson, M. A. 2021. "Motif Frequency and its Relation to Genre". Literature & Culture and/as Intelligent Systems. Virtual Workshop.
- [Paper] Acharya, A., Talamadupula, K., & Finlayson, M. A. 2021. "Towards an Atlas of Cultural Commonsense for Machine Reasoning." Workshop on Common Sense Knowledge Graphs (CSKGs), The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Virtual Conference.
- [Paper] KC, K., Acharya, A., Acharya, A., & Shrestha, S. 2021. "Transfer Learned Mobilenets with shrinking hyperparameters for classifying Covid-19 based on X-ray images". Advanced Engineering and ICT-Convergence Proceedings. Vol 4, No. 2. Virtual Conference. -- Received Best Paper award
Artifacts
- [Code] Multi-context Assessment Pipeline for Language model Evaluation (MAPLE). 2025. GitHub
- [Benchmark] National Environmental Policy Act Question and Answering Dataset (NEPAQuAD). 2024. Kaggle
- [Dataset] NEPATEC1.0: First Large-Scale Text Corpus of National Environmental Policy Act PDF Documents. 2024. HuggingFace
Talks, Seminars, and Presentations
- Talk – “LLM Co-Pilot for Scientific Research”, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). June 2025
- Panel – “Towards a more ethical and trustworthy AI”, PNNL. August 2023. Organized in absentia
- Talk – Acharya, A. Saldanha, E. (Presenter) “Detecting and studying narratives in text”, PNNL. August 2023
- Talk – “Integrating Cultural Knowledge into Artificially Intelligent Systems”, PNNL. August 2022
- Talk – “Extracting Narrative Representation from Social Media Posts”, PNNL. August 2020
- Presentation – “Extracting Narrative Components from Tweets”, Research Symposium, PNNL. July 2020
- Panel – “What is AI and What is it Good For?”, Miami-Dade College, Miami, FL. February 2020
- Panel – “The Future of AI”, Cognitive Science Society, Florida International University. November 2019
Other Professional Activities (Service)
- Organizing Committee LLM for Data: From Unstructured PDF Data to Multimodal Knowledge Repositories: Methods and Evaluation, held in conjunction with PNNL TechFest, Richland, WA. 2025
- Organizing Committee SocioNLP: The Social Development through NLP-driven Interdisciplinary Collaborations, held in conjunction with the PETRA Conference in Crete and Corfu, Greece. 2024 — 2025
- Review Committee Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL): A centralized reviewing service for top-tier ACL conferences, including ACL, NAACL, EACL, EMNLP, etc. Published by ACL. 2024 — Present
- Review Committee IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI): A multidisciplinary journal publishing theories and methodologies of AI. Published by IEEE. 2023 — Present
- Review Committee Humanities and Social Sciences Communications: A peer-reviewed open-access academic journal. Published by Nature Portfolio. 2023 — Present
- Review Committee Natural Language Engineering Journal: A bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering NLP research and software. Published by Cambridge University Press. 2023 — Present
- Review Committee International Journal of Data Science and Analytics: A peer-reviewed journal covering data science research. Published by Springer. 2023 — Present
- Ethics Review Committee NeurIPS: The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Annual. 2023 — Present
- Ethics Review Committee NeurIPS Dataset and Benchmarks Track: The Thirty-Ninth NeurIPS Conference, San Diego, CA. 2025
- Program Committee ER2024: The 43rd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, Pittsburgh, PA. 2024
- Program Committee Text2Story 2024: Seventh International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts, Glasgow, Scotland. 2024
- Program Committee ReLM: Workshop on Responsible Language Models, held at AAAI in Vancouver, Canada. February 2024
- Judge FIU Undergraduate Research Conference: Showcasing undergraduate research across disciplines, Miami, FL. April 2022
- Session Chair Ninth Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS) Conference: Research on foundational AI and cognitive science. Virtual. November 2021
- Organizing Committee ComSciCon Miami: A science communication workshop for graduate students, Miami, FL. October 2021
Languages
- Nepali Native Language
- English Native Proficiency
- Hindi Minimum Professional Proficiency
- Urdu Spoken only, Minimum Professional Proficiency
- French Elementary Proficiency
Last Updated 28th July 2025