Overview

Dr. Souvika Sarkar is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing at Wichita State University. Dr. Sarkar鈥檚 research focuses on enhancing the accessibility and practical applications of AI and data science, making these technologies more usable and beneficial to a broader audience. Her work lies at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), aiming to equip machines with a deep semantic understanding of natural language. She explores how language, as a fundamental aspect of human cognition, captures complex expressions of intent, opinion, and emotion, seeking to create AI that is both context-aware and scalable for real-world applications.

Dr. Sarkar earned her Ph.D. from Auburn University, where she was recognized with the 100+ Women Strong Outstanding Departmental Annual Graduate Award and Auburn University鈥檚 Outstanding Doctoral Student Award. She also holds a master鈥檚 degree in software engineering from Jadavpur University.

Alongside her academic accomplishments, Dr. Sarkar has significant industry experience as an IT Analyst at Tata Consultancy Services. During her tenure, she worked on configuring and managing Microsoft Office SharePoint servers, migrating systems to Office 365, and developing workflows to enhance enterprise processes.

Information

Academic Interests and Expertise
  • Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science and Software Engineering, Auburn University, 2024
  • Master of Engineering, Software Engineering, Jadavpur University, 2018
  • Bachelor of Technology, Computer Science, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, 2011
Areas of Research Interest
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Information Retrieval
  • Intelligent Agents
  • Deep Learning
Areas of Teaching Interest
  • CS 797Y Natural Language Processing
  • CS 775 Information Retrieval
  • CS 771 Artificial Intelligence
Publications
  1. Souvika Sarkar, Dongji Feng, and Shubhra Kanti Karmaker Santu. "Zero-Shot Multi-Label Topic Inference with Sentence Encoders & LLMs." The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 16218鈥�16233.
  2. Mousumi Akter, Souvika Sarkar, and Shubhra Kanti Karmaker Santu. "On Evaluation of Bangla Word Analogies." The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 13121鈥�13127.
  3. Souvika Sarkar et al. "Ad-Hoc Monitoring of COVID-19 Global Research Trends for Well-Informed Policy Making." ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 2022, pp. 1鈥�28.
  4. Souvika Sarkar et al. "Exploring Universal Sentence Encoders for Zero-shot Text Classification." Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022, pp. 135鈥�147.
  5. Souvika Sarkar et al. "Processing Natural Language on Embedded Devices: How Well Do Modern Models Perform?" ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), 2024.
  6. Souvika Sarkar et al. "Concept Annotation from Users' Perspective: A New Challenge." WWW UserNLP, 2022, pp. 1180鈥�1188.
  7. Biddut Sarker Bijoy et al. "COVID19伪: Interactive Spatio-Temporal Visualization of COVID-19 Symptoms through Tweet Analysis." ACM IUI, 2021, pp. 28鈥�30.
  8. Biddut Sarker Bijoy et al. "Containing COVID-19 Pandemic by Mining Knowledge from Scientific Literature and Social Media." ICDATA, 2021.
Professional Experience
  • Assistant Professor, School of Computing, 萝莉社 University, Wichita, KS, 8/2024 鈥� Present
  • IT Analyst, Tata Consultancy Services, 2016鈥�2019
  • System Engineer, Tata Consultancy Services, 2012鈥�2018
Awards and Honors
  • Auburn University's Outstanding Doctoral Student Award, 2024
  • 100+ Women Strong Outstanding Departmental Annual Graduate Award, 2023
Other Interests

Yoga

Additional Information

Dr. Souvika Sarkar is seeking motivated Ph.D. students to join her research team at 萝莉社in the area of Natural Language Processing. Her current focus is on Generative AI models, exploring their potential to develop innovative solutions for real-world challenges. If you are interested, please reach out to Dr. Sarkar at souvika.sarkar@wichita.edu with your CV.