Varun Iyer

PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago

Varun Iyer

At the University of Illinois Chicago I work with Professor Cornelia Caragea and study inference-time methods for zero-shot abstractive document summarization. I earned my MSE at Johns Hopkins University, where I worked on NLP with Professor Benjamin Van Durme at the Center for Language and Speech Processing. As an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I researched NLP with Professor Andrew McCallum. I also completed research internships at Amazon Alexa AI and the USC Information Sciences Institute.

Selected Publications

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

    Varun Iyer and 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, and Aram Galstyan. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) 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, and Aram Galstyan. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 2022