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Varun Iyer

CS PhD student at UIC

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I am a computer science PhD student at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I work with Professor Cornelia Caragea. I study inference-time methods for zero-shot abstractive document summarization. I earned my master’s at Johns Hopkins, where I worked on NLP with Professor Benjamin van Durme at the Center for Language and Speech Processing. As an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, I conducted NLP research with Professor Andrew McCallum. I also completed research internships at Amazon Alexa AI and the University of Southern California.

Selected Publications

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  1. BLooP: Zero-Shot Abstractive Summarization Using Large Language Models with Bigram Lookahead Promotion

    Varun Iyer, Cornelia Caragea. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 2026

  2. ParaAMR: A Large-Scale Syntactically Diverse Paraphrase Dataset by AMR Back-Translation

    Kuan-Hao Huang, Varun Iyer, I-Hung Hsu, Anoop Kumar, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2023 Area Chair Award

  3. Unsupervised Syntactically Controlled Paraphrase Generation with Abstract Meaning Representations

    Kuan-Hao Huang*, Varun Iyer*, Anoop Kumar, Sriram Venkatapathy, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022