Shohini Bhattasali

Shohini Bhattasali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Language Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a cross-appointment in the Department of Linguistics at the St. George campus. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from Cornell University (2019) with a graduate minor in Cognitive Science. Her research focuses on computational neurolinguistics and computational social science, exploring neural mechanisms of language processing and mitigating bias/misinformation through NLP tools. She has held postdoctoral roles at the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Linguistics Department.

Education:

• PhD in Linguistics, Cornell University
• MA in Linguistics, Cornell University
• AB in Linguistics, Bryn Mawr College (magna cum laude)

Research Themes:

1. Computational Neurolinguistics: Investigates top-down prediction during sentence processing, interaction between linguistic levels and cognitive mechanisms using fMRI/EEG data.
2. Computational Social Science: Leverages topic models and language models to uncover bias/misinformation in social media and public health texts.

Grants & Projects:

• Principal investigator for Data Sciences Institute grant on AI-driven mitigation of harmful social media content (2023).
• Co-developer of the Le Petit Prince multilingual fMRI corpus (Scientific Data, 2022).

Teaching: Courses include Syntax I (LINB06), Computational Methods for Linguistics (JFL1107), and Morphology (LINB10).