PortNLP - NLP Lab at Portland State: About

Dr. Agrawal presenting her work at CETI

Our lab at Women in Big Data Northwest AI Summit

Panel discussion at CETI

Sina and Dr. Agrawal presenting at NeSy 2025

Pop a Lang.!

Lang. Popped: 0

The PortNLP lab is led by Dr. Ameeta Agrawal.

At PortNLP, we explore new ways to advance language technologies -- from understanding complex texts to generating multilingual summaries. We aim to design systems that are effective, efficient, fair, and human-centered. We envision a future where language technologies are trustworthy and useful in everyday life.

PortNLP started in 2021 with PI and two students focusing on a few specific domains of text summarization and multilingual language models. As we have continued to grow, our past students and present members are contributing to a wide range of topics in natural language understanding and processing.

We are also affiliated with the Coco Lab, a sister research group focused on the intersection of computer science, management, and anthropology.

Research Themes

Language Understanding

Long Context
Ambiguity
Contextual Grounding

Language Generation

Summarization
Multilingual Modeling
Efficient NLP

Human-Centered NLP

Affective Modeling
Conversational Systems
Bias Mitigation

Recent News

April 2026

PhD Defense: Many congratulations to Bisi on the successful defense of her PhD thesis! 🎉

Paper Updates
3 Papers Accepted at ACL 2026!

No-Worse Context-Aware Decoding: Preventing Neutral Regression in Context-Conditioned Generation, Yufei Tao, Ameeta Agrawal
ThreadSumm: Summarization of Nested Discourse Threads Using Tree of Thoughts, Olubusayo Olabisi, Ekata Mitra, Ameeta Agrawal
Self-Explaining Hate Speech Detection with Moral Rationales, Francielle Vargas, Jackson Trager, Diego Alves, Surendrabikram Thapa, Matteo Guida, Berk Atil, Daryna Dementieva, Andrew Smart, Ameeta Agrawal

Award: Congratulations to Malini on getting her talk accepted at “AI Unlocked: Empowering Higher Education through Research and Discovery,” sponsored by ACCESS, the NAIRR Pilot, and the University of Colorado Boulder. The title of her talk is “Designing Reproducible Evaluation Scaffolds for LLM-Assisted Computer Science Education: A Comparative Study Across Models and Task Types”.🏆

Award: Congratulations to Ekata on receiving the OISSS Award for Academic Excellence! 🏆

March 2026

Paper Updates

Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence [Journal]: Robust Long-Context Multilingual Retrieval and Reasoning Enabled by Combined Neural and Symbolic Techniques, Sina Bagheri Nezhad, Ameeta Agrawal.
AI, Computer Science and Robotics Technology [Journal]: Engagingness in Open-Domain Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Survey of Datasets, Metrics, and Methods, Ekata Mitra, Amila Ferron, Ameeta Agrawal

February 2026

RPE: Ekata officially passed her Research Proficiency Exam, a major milestone in her PhD journey. 🎉

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