Rhitabrat Pokharel

pokharel [at] pdx.edu.

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I am a PhD Candidate in Computer Science (Natural Language Processing) at Portland State University, under the guidance of Dr. Ameeta Agrawal (PortNLP Lab). Currently, I am working on improving LLM’s multilingual ability. I have also worked on projected related to low-resource languages, machine translation (MT), MT post-editing (MTPE), idiomaticity, multi-word expressions, and social media information extraction.

I am on the lookout for Internship or Full-Time positions.

Latest News

Feb, 2025 🏆 Got accepted to the NAIRR Pilot AI Unlocked Workshop (NSF funded) in Denver this April!
Jan, 2025 ✍🏼 Got a paper on model scaling accepted at SEAS workshop (AAAI 2025).
Jan, 2025 🎤 Presented a paper at CHiPSAL workshop (COLING 2025).
Nov, 2024 🎯 Successfully defended my PhD proposal titled Enhanced Multilingual Text Generation with Large Language Models.
Nov, 2024 🌱 Co-mentored Paola during her NSF REU internship at PSU.

Publications

  1. The Impact of Model Scaling on Seen and Unseen Language Performance
    Rhitabrat Pokharel, and Ameeta Agrawal
    In Scalable and Efficient Artificial Intelligence Systems, 2025
  2. neDIOM: Dataset and Analysis of Nepali Idioms
    Rhitabrat Pokharel, and Ameeta Agrawal
    In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2025), 2025
  3. Beyond Data Quantity: Key Factors Driving Performance in Multilingual Language Models
    Sina Bagheri Nezhad, Ameeta Agrawal, and Rhitabrat Pokharel
    In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages, 2025
  4. Multilingual Evaluation of Long Context Retrieval and Reasoning
    Ameeta Agrawal, Andy Dang, Sina Bagheri Nezhad, Rhitabrat Pokharel, and Russell Scheinberg
    In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning (MRL), 2024
  5. Generating Continuations in Multilingual Idiomatic Contexts
    Rhitabrat Pokharel, and Ameeta Agrawal
    In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning (MRL), 2023
  6. All Translation Tools Are Not Equal: Investigating the Quality of Language Translation for Forced Migration
    Ameeta Agrawal, Lisa Singh, Elizabeth Jacobs, Yaguang Liu, Gwyneth Dunlevy, Rhitabrat Pokharel, and Varun Uppala
    In 2023 IEEE 10th International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA), 2023
  7. Estimating Semantic Similarity between In-Domain and Out-of-Domain Samples
    Rhitabrat Pokharel, and Ameeta Agrawal
    In Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023), 2023
  8. Machine Learning Predictions of Electricity Capacity
    Marcus Harris, Elizabeth Kirby, Ameeta Agrawal, Rhitabrat Pokharel, Francis Puyleart, and Martin Zwick
    Energies, 2023
  9. Classifying YouTube Comments Based on Sentiment and Type of Sentence
    Rhitabrat Pokharel, and Dixit Bhatta
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.01908, 2021

Seminars and Talks

[Conference Poster Presentation] -- nediom: Dataset and Analysis of Nepali Idioms, CHiPSAL [COLING], 2025. [Virtual]

[Conference Poster Presentation] -- Generating Continuations in Multilingual Idiomatic Contexts, MRL [EMNLP], 2023. [Virtual]

[Conference Presentation] -- Estimating Semantic Similarity between In-Domain and Out-of-Domain Samples, *SEM [ACL], 2023. [In Person]

[Conference Poster Presentation] -- Estimating Semantic Similarity between In-Domain and Out-of-Domain Samples, *SEM [ACL], 2023. [In Person]

Professional Services

[Reviewer] -- COLING, Computational Intelligence, Undergraduate Students Scholarship at Portland State University.
[Sub-reviewer] -- ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ARR.
[Co-Founder] -- MRFOSS Club (a club for open source software initiatives) -- 2018.