about

I am a freelance researcher and writer living between Berlin and Oslo. My academic interests focus, broadly, on the transformations in society, spurred on by the development and deployment of contemporary artificial intelligence. My lens into this is predominantly through an an analysis of the political economy of these developments.

I have a PhD in multilingual language technology from the University of Oslo; my PhD included a research visit to the University of Copenhagen. My dissertation was at the intersection of multilinguality in language models and their interpretability. I attempted to critique the capacities of contemporary artificial intelligence to simulate human language, particularly from the perspective of non-English languages.

Aside from my academic work, I am a musician. I design audio for live environments, score films, and work as a sound engineer on a volunteer basis.

To get in touch, write me at vinit [dot] ravishankar [at] gmail [dot] com.

publications

• Vinit Ravishankar. Transcending Autonomism. The Left Berlin (2024).
• Vinit Ravishankar. Anti-Wagenknecht. The Left Berlin (2024).
• Vinit Ravishankar, Joakim Nivre. The Effects of Corpus Choice and Morphosyntax on Multilingual Space Induction. Findings of EMNLP (2022)
• Raul Vázquez, Hande Celikkanat, Vinit Ravishankar, Mathias Creutz, Jörg Tiedemann. A Closer Look at Parameter Contributions When Training Neural Language and Translation Models. COLING (2022)
• *Mostafa Abdou, *Vinit Ravishankar, Artur Kulmizev, Anders Søgaard. Word Order Does Matter (And Shuffled Language Models Know It). ACL (2022)
• Vinit Ravishankar, Anders Søgaard. The Impact of Positional Encodings on Multilingual Compression. EMNLP (2021)
• *Vinit Ravishankar, *Artur Kulmizev, Mostafa Abdou, Anders Søgaard, Joakim Nivre. Attention Can Reflect Syntactic Structure — If You Let It. EACL (2021)
• Vinit Ravishankar, Andrey Kutuzov, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal. Multilingual ELMo and the Effects of Corpus Sampling. NoDaLiDa (2021)
• *Anne Lauscher, *Vinit Ravishankar, Ivan Vulic, Goran Glavas. From Zero to Hero: on the Limitations of Zero-Shot Language Transfer With Multilingual Transformers. EMNLP (2020)
• David Mareček, Hande Celikkanat, Miika Silfverberg, Vinit Ravishankar, Jörg Tiedemann. Are Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models Better At Capturing Linguistic Features? The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics (115)
• Artur Kulmizev, Vinit Ravishankar, Mostafa Abdou, Joakim Nivre. Do Neural Language Models Show Preferences for Syntactic Formalisms? ACL (2020)
• Jeremy Barnes, Vinit Ravishankar, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal. Hierarchical Models vs . Transfer Learning for Document-Level Sentiment Classification. ArXiv (2020)
• Mostafa Abdou, Vinit Ravishankar, Maria Barrett, Yonatan Belinkov, Desmond Elliott, Anders Søgaard. The Sensitivity Of Language Models And Humans To Winograd Schema Perturbations. ACL (2020)
• Vinit Ravishankar, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal. Probing Multilingual Sentence Representations With X-Probe. RepL4NLP (2019)
• Vinit Ravishankar, Memduh Gökırmak, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal. Multilingual Probing Of Deep Pre-Trained Contextual Encoders. DL4NLP (2019)
• Francis M. Tyers, Vinit Ravishankar. A Prototype Dependency Treebank for Breton. TALN (2018).
• Vinit Ravishankar. A Universal Dependencies Treebank for Marathi. TLT (2018)
• Artur Kulmizev, Mostafa Abdou, Vinit Ravishankar, Malvina Nissim. Discriminator At SemEval-2018 Task 10: Minimally Supervised Discrimination. *SEMEVAL (2018)
• Franck Burlot, Yves Scherrer, Vinit Ravishankar, Ondrej Bojar, S. Grönroos, Maarit Koponen, Tommi Nieminen, François Yvon. The WMT’18 Morpheval Test Suites For English-Czech, English- German, English-Finnish And Turkish-English. WMT (2018)
• Mostafa Abdou, Artur Kulmizev, Vinit Ravishankar, Lasha Abzianidze, Johan Bos. What Can We Learn From Semantic Tagging? EMNLP (2018)
• Mostafa Abdou, Artur Kulmizev, Vinit Ravishankar. MGAD: Multilingual Generation of Analogy Datasets. LREC (2018)
• Vinit Ravishankar, Francis M. Tyers, Albert Gatt. A Morphological Analyser for Maltese. ACLING (2017)
• Vinit Ravishankar, Francis M. Tyers. Finite-State Morphological Analysis for Marathi. FSMNLP (2017)
• Vinit Ravishankar. Finite-State Back-Transliteration for Marathi. The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics (108)