Saloni Potdar

Senior AI/ML Manager @ Apple
I work on Natural Language Processing and machine learning research specifically in generative AI, question answering and conversational AI. I am a Senior AI/ML Manager in the Siri and Search team at Apple leading the query understanding and knowledge graph machine learning initiatives. I have 30+ patents and 20+ papers accepted at top conferences like ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI and KDD with over 1000+ citations.
Prior to this I was a Senior Staff Applied Scientist and Engineering Manager at IBM Watson where I designed and developed algorithms for IBM's conversational AI product - Watson Assistant.
I got my Masters degree at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2014. I was awarded the Women in AI Award - North America (Special Jury Recognition) in 2023 for my work in AI.

News

2024 November
Our paper won the Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP.
2024 November
3 papers accepted at EMNLP. Learn more at Apple ML Research.
2024 September
SemEval 2025 Task on Entity Aware Machine Translation task launched.
2024 August
Co-organizing the Workshop on Applied Machine Learning Management at KDD. Learn more at Apple ML Research.
2024 August
Papers accepted into ACL KaLLM Workshop and KnowledgeableLM Workshop. Learn more at Apple ML Research.
2024 June
Safari Highlights feature announced at WWDC (DRI for the project). Covered in Mashable, Verge, Wired.
2024 June
Paper accepted into NAACL 2024. Learn more at Apple ML Research.
2024 May
5 patents filed with USPTO for the work on conversational AI
2023 August
Co-organizing the Workshop on Applied Machine Learning Management at KDD
2023 August
Won the special jury recognition award - Women in AI North America
2022 December
Paper accepted into the EMNLP Industry Track
2022 July
Paper accepted into the ACL Workshop
2022 June
Paper accepted into the AAAI
2022 October
Joining Apple as a Senior AI/ML Manager to lead the Knowledge Graph Machine Learning team under Siri and Search
2022 July
Nominated as Rising Star at VentureBeat Women in AI Awards
2022 June
Semi-finalist for MIT 35 innovators under 35
2022 June
Awarded the IBM Master Inventor title for outstanding & sustained contributions to IP
2018-2022
Launched multiple iterations of WatsonX Assistant industry leading AI models and features. It was crucial for enterprises and during covid-19 crisis. Covered in TechRadar and VentureBeat

Publications and Patents

Towards Cross-Cultural Machine Translation with Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Multilingual Knowledge Graphs
Simone Conia , Daniel Lee , Min Li , Umar Farooq Minhas , Saloni Potdar , Yunyao Li
EMNLP (Main Track) 2024
PDF Outstanding Paper
AGRaME Any-Granularity Ranking with Multi-Vector Embeddings
Revanth Gangi Reddy , Omar Attia , Yunyao Li , Heng Ji , Saloni Potdar
EMNLP (Main Track) 2024
ConvKGYarn Spinning Configurable and Scalable Conversational Knowledge Graph QA datasets with Large Language Models
Ronak Pradeep , Daniel Lee , Ali Mousavi , Jeff Pound , Yisi Sang , Jimmy Lin , Ihab Ilyas , Saloni Potdar , Mostafa Arefiyan , Yunyao Li
EMNLP (Industry Track) 2024
Entity Disambiguation via Fusion Entity Decoding
Junxiong Wang , Ali Mousavi , Omar Attia , Saloni Potdar , Alexander Rush , Umar Farooq Minhas , Yunyao Li
NAACL (Main Track) 2024
Do Large Language Models Have an English Accent? Evaluating and Improving the Naturalness of Multilingual LLMs
Yanzhu Guo , Simone Conia , Zelin Zhou , Min Li , Saloni Potdar , Henry Xiao
arXiv preprint 2024
Configuring artificial intelligence-based virtual assistants using response modes
Matthew Richard Arnold , Eric Donald Wayne , Saloni Potdar
US Patent App. 18085257 2024
Pretraining of Split Layer Portions for Multilingual Model
Lin Pan , Haode Qi , Ladislav Kunc , Saloni Potdar
US Patent App. 18063788 2024
Detecting out-of-domain text data in dialog systems using artificial intelligence
Cheng Qian , Haode Qi , Saloni Potdar , Ladislav Kunc
US Patent App. 17/897,887 2024
Out of domain sentence detection
Haode Qi , Cheng Qian , Ladislav Kunc , Saloni Potdar , Eric Wayne
US Patent App. US17/815,630 2024
The Third Workshop on Applied Machine Learning Management
Dmitri Goldenberg , Elena Sokolova , Shir Meir Lador , Irina Vasilinetc , Lin Lee Cheong , Mohak Sukhwani , Saloni Potdar
Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2024
The Second Workshop on Applied Machine Learning Management
Dmitri Goldenberg , Chana Ross , Shir Meir Lador , Lin Lee Cheong , Panpan Xu , Elena Sokolova , Amit Mandelbaum , Irina Vasilinetc , Ankit Jain , Amit Weil Modlinger , Saloni Potdar
Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2023
Conversational AI with multi-lingual human chatlogs
Haode Qi , Lin Pan , Abhishek Shah , Ladislav Kunc , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,853,712 2023
Out-of-domain encoder training
Ming Tan , Dakuo Wang , Mo Yu , Haoyu Wang , Yang Yu , Shiyu Chang , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,645,514 2023
Domain specific model compression
Haoyu Wang , Yang Yu , Ming Tan , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,620,435 2023
Distinguish Sense from Nonsense Out-of-Scope Detection for Virtual Assistants
Cheng Qian , Haode Qi , Gengyu Wang , Ladislav Kunc , Saloni Potdar
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Industry Track 2022
Artificial intelligence based context dependent spellchecking
Panos Karagiannis , Ladislav Kunc , Saloni Potdar , Haoyu Wang , Navneet Rao
US Patent 11,301,626 2022
Intent classification distribution calibration
Haoyu Wang , Ming Tan , Dakuo Wang , Chuang Gan , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,436,528 2022
Contextual question answering using human chat logs
Yang Yu; , Ming Tan , Shasha Lin , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,443,117 2022
Routing text classifications within a cross-domain conversational service
Ming Tan , Ladislav Kunc , Yang Yu; , Haoyu Wang , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,270,077 2022
Evaluating text classification anomalies predicted by a text classification model
Ming Tan , Saloni Potdar , Lakshminarayanan Krishnamurthy
US Patent 11,537,821 2022
Hybrid model for short text classification with imbalanced data
Yang Yu , Ming Tan , Ravi Nair , Haoyu Wang , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,328,221 2022
Fast and Light-Weight Answer Text Retrieval in Dialogue Systems
Hui Wan , Siva Sankalp Patel , William Murdock , Saloni Potdar , Sachindra Joshi
NAACL (Industry Track) 2022
Benchmarking Language-agnostic Intent Classification for Virtual Assistant Platforms
Gengyu Wang , Cheng Qian , Lin Pan , Haode Qi , Ladislav Kunc , Saloni Potdar
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA) 2022
Unintended bias detection in conversational agent platforms with machine learning model
Navneet Rao , Ming Tan , Haode Qi , Yang Yu , Panos Karagiannis , Saloni Potdar
Google Patents 2022
Generating question answer pairs
Dakuo Wang , Mo Yu , Chuang Gan , Saloni Potdar
US Patent App. 17/302,550 2022
Intent Classification using non-correlated features
Abhishek Shah , Ladislav Kunc , Haode Qi , Lin Pan , Saloni Potdar
US Patent App. 17/350,116 2024
Comparing Model Development Practices in B2B vs B2C Machine Learning Teams
Navneet Rao , Saloni Potdar
Workshop on Applied Machine Learning Management - Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2022
Improved text classification via contrastive adversarial training
Lin Pan , Chung-Wei Hang , Avirup Sil , Saloni Potdar
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2022
Weak supervised abnormal entity detection
Haode Qi , Ming Tan , Yang Yu , Navneet Rao , Ladislav Kunc , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,423,227 2022
Intent boundary segmentation for multi-intent utterances
Ming Tan , Haoyu Wang , Saloni Potdar , Yang Yu , Navneet Rao , Haode Qi
US Patent 11,308,944 2022
Mechanisms for continuous improvement of automated machine learning
Haode Qi , Ming Tan , Ladislav Kunc , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,423,333 2022
Feature reweighting in text classifier generation using unlabeled data
Yang Yu , Haode Qi , Haoyu Wang , Ming Tan , Navneet Rao , Saloni Potdar Robert Yates
US Patent 11,216,619 2022
Suggestion of new entity types with discriminative term importance analysis
Haode Qi , Ming Tan , Yang Yu , Navneet Rao , Saloni Potdar , Haoyu Wang
US Patent 11,379,666 2022
Learning Parameter Sampling Configuration for Automated Machine Learning
Haode Qi , Ming Tan , Ladislav Kunc , Saloni Potdar
Google Patents 2021
Privacy Protection Through Template Embedding
Haode Qi , Saloni Potdar , Ming Tan , Navneet Rao
Google Patents 2021
Bias Detection in Conversational Agent Platforms
Navneet Rao , Ming Tan , Haode Qi , Yang Yu , Panos Karagiannis , Saloni Potdar
Google Patents 2021
Adversarial training data augmentation data for text classifiers
Ming Tan , Ruijian Wang , Inkit Padhi , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,093,707 2021
Displaying text classification anomalies predicted by a text classification model
Ming Tan , Saloni Potdar , Lakshminarayanan Krishnamurthy
US Patent 11,068,656 2021
Updating an online multi-domain sentence representation generation module of a text classification system
Ming Tan , Ladislav Kunc , Yang Yu , Haoyu Wang , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,120,225 2021
Cross-domain multi-task learning for text classification
Ming Tan , Haoyu Wang , Ladislav Kunc , Yang Yu , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 10,937,416 2021
Displaying text classification anomalies predicted by a text classification model
Ming Tan , Saloni Potdar , Lakshminarayanan Krishnamurthy
US Patent 11,074,414 2021
Narrative Question Answering with Cutting-Edge Open-Domain QA Techniques A Comprehensive Study
Xiangyang Mou , Chenghao Yang , Mo Yu , Bingsheng Yao , Xiaoxiao Guo , Saloni Potdar , Hui Su
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2021
Benchmarking Commercial Intent Detection Services with Practice-Driven Evaluations
Haode Qi , Lin Pan , Atin Sood , Abhishek Shah , Ladislav Kunc , Mo Yu , Saloni Potdar
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Human Language Technologies Industry Papers 2021
Weighting features for an intent classification system
Yang Yu , Ladislav Kunc , Haoyu Wang , Ming Tan , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 10,977,445 2021
Out-of-domain sentence detection
Inkit Padhi , Ruijian Wang , Haoyu Wang , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,023,683 2021
Adversarial training data augmentation for generating related responses
Ming Tan , Ruijian Wang , Inkit Padhi , Saloni Potdar
US Patent 11,189,269 2021
Multilingual BERT Post-Pretraining Alignment
Lin Pan , Chung-Wei Hang , Haode Qi , Abhishek Shah , Mo Yu , Saloni Potdar
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Human Language Technologies 2020
Implementing dynamic confidence rescaling with modularity in automatic user intent detection systems
Yang Yu , Ladislav Kunc , Saloni Potdar
Google Patents 2020
Frustratingly Hard Evidence Retrieval for QA Over Books
Xiangyang Mou , Mo Yu , Bingsheng Yao , Chenghao Yang , Xiaoxiao Guo , Saloni Potdar , Hui Su
Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events 2020
Diverse Few-Shot Text Classification with Multiple Metrics
Mo Yu , Xiaoxiao Guo , Jinfeng Yi , Shiyu Chang , Saloni Potdar , Gerald Tesauro , Wang, Haoyu
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Human Language Technologies 2018
Extracting Multiple-Relations in One-Pass with Pre-Trained Transformers
Haoyu Wang , Ming Tan , Mo Yu , Shiyu Chang , Dakuo Wang, , Kun Xu , Xiaoxiao Guo , Saloni Potdar
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2019
Context-Aware Conversation Thread Detection in Multi-Party Chat
Ming Tan , Dakuo Wang , Yupeng Gao , Haoyu Wang , Saloni Potdar , Xiaoxiao Guo , Shiyu Chang , Mo Yu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) 2019
Out-of-Domain Detection for Low-Resource Text Classification Tasks
Ming Tan , Yang Yu , Haoyu Wang , Dakuo Wang , Saloni Potdar , Shiyu Chang , Mo Yu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) 2019
Identifying student leaders from MOOC discussion forums through language influence
Seungwhan Moon , Saloni Potdar , Lara Martin
Proceedings of the EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Analysis of Large Scale Social Interaction in MOOCs 2014
Neural Models for Sequence Chunking
Feifei Zhai , Saloni Potdar , Bing Xiang , Bowen Zhou
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2017
Robust Task Clustering for Deep Many-Task Learning
Mo Yu , Xiaoxiao Guo , Jinfeng Yi , Shiyu Chang , Saloni Potdar , Gerald Tesauro , Wang, Haoyu , Bowen Zhou
arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.07918 2017