Sunny Rai

Sunny Rai

University of Pennsylvania

Latest (Preprints)

  • Cross-Cultural Considerations for Designing Mental Health Applications: Ten Practical Recommendations Link
  • Conversations with AI Chatbots Increase Short-Term Vaccine Intentions But Do Not Outperform Standard Public Health Messaging. Link

For latest publication, visit Google Scholar Profile

Selected Publications

  • Havaldar, S., Cho, Y.M., Rai, S., Ungar, L. (2025) Culturally-Aware Conversations: A Framework & Benchmark for LLMs. Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing. EMNLP 2025.
  • Gupta, A., Joseph, R., & Rai, S. (2025, August). HATS: Hindi Analogy Test Set for Evaluating Reasoning in Large Language Models. In The 2nd Workshop on Analogical Abstraction in Cognition, Perception, and Language (Analogy-Angle II) (p. 57).
  • Rai, S., Zaveri, K., Havaldar, S., Nema, S., Ungar, L., & Guntuku, S. C. (2025, April). Social norms in cinema: A cross-cultural analysis of shame, pride and prejudice. NAACL. Featured in Ideas of India podcast , The Great Gender Divergence
  • Rai, S., Shelat, K., Jain, D. R., Sivabalan, K., Cho, Y. M., Redkar, M., … & Guntuku, S. C. (2025, May). Cross-Cultural Differences in Mental Health Expressions on Social Media. In The 3rd Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP 2025) (p. 132). 🏆 Outstanding Paper Award
  • Havaldar, S, Giorgi, S, Rai, S., Talhelm, T, Ungar, L., Guntuku, S.C. (2024). Building Knowledge Guided Lexica to Model Cultural Variation. NAACL’24.
  • Rai, S., Stade, E. C., Giorgi, S., Francisco, A., Ungar, L. H., Curtis, B., & Guntuku, S. C. (2024). Key language markers of depression on social media depend on race. PNAS. Paper 🏆 Plenary talk at IC2S2 2023.
  • Cho, Y.M., Rai, S., Ungar, L., Sedoc J., Guntuku, S.C. (2023). An Integrative Survey on Mental Health Conversational Agents to Bridge Computer Science and Medical Perspectives. EMNLP’23, Singapore.
  • Havaldar, S., Rai, S., Singhal, B., Liu, L, Guntuku, S.C., & Ungar, L. (2023). Multilingual Language Models are not Multicultural: A Case Study in Emotion. WASSA’23, ACL. Paper - 🏆 Best Paper Award
  • Joseph, R., Liu, T., Ng, A.B., See S., & Rai, S. (2023) NewsMet : A ‘do it all’ dataset of contemporary Metaphors in News headlines. ACL’23 Findings (Long). Paper + Data + Poster
  • Aggarwal, A., Rai, S., Giorgi, S., Havaldar, S., Sherman, G., Mittal, J. & Guntuku, S. C. (2023). A Cross-Modal Study of Pain Across Communities in the United States. WWW’23 Companion. Link
  • Bogireddy, N.R., Suresh S., & Rai, S. (2023). I’m out of breath from laughing! I think? A dataset of COVID-19 Humor and its toxic variants. WWW’23 Companion. Preprint and Dataset available here. 🏆 Dataset for CLEF 2024 Automatic Humor Analysis
  • Rai, S., Joseph R., Thakur P.S. & Khaliq A.M. (2022). Identifying Human Needs through Social Media: A study on Indian cities during COVID-19. Social NLP, NAACL 2022 . Available at Link
  • [Non archival] Joseph R., Rai, S., Thakur P.S. & Khaliq A.M. (2022). Pandemic, People and Pattern of Needs: Emerging Trends in Indian Society during COVID-19. IC2S2 2022 . Abstract available at Link
  • Khaliq, A M., Joseph, R. & Rai, S. (2021). #covid is war and #vaccine is weapon? COVID-19 metaphors in India. In the 18th Proceedings of International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), NLPAI. Link
  • Rai, S., & Chakraverty, S. (2020). A Survey on Computational Metaphor Processing. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 53(2), 1-37. Link
  • [Non archival] Gollapudi, U. M., Perla, M., Hitesh, S., Kumaran, R., Rai, S., & Das, A. Understanding User Vulnerability Towards Radicalization On Twitter. In 5th International Conference on Computational Social Science IC2S2, July 17-20, 2019, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
  • Rai, S., Chakraverty, S., Tayal, D. K., Sharma, D., & Garg, A. (2019). Understanding metaphors using emotions. New Generation Computing, 37(1), 5-27. Link
  • Rai, S., Garg, A., & Chakraverty, S. (2018, December). Understanding the role of visual features in Emoji Similarity. In International Conference on Intelligent Information Technologies (pp. 89-97). Springer, Singapore. Link
  • Rai, S., Chakraverty, S., Tayal, D. K., & Kukreti, Y. (2018). A study on impact of context on metaphor detection. The Computer Journal, 61(11), 1667-1682. Link
  • Rai S., Chakraverty S. (2017). Metaphor Detection Using Fuzzy Rough Sets. In: Polkowski L. et al. (eds) Rough Sets. IJCRS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10313. Springer, Cham. Link
  • Rai, S., Chakraverty, S., & Tayal, D. K. (2016, June). Supervised metaphor detection using conditional random fields. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Metaphor in NLP (pp. 18-27), NAACL-HLT, San Diego. Link
  • Jain, A., Tayal, D. K., & Rai, S. (2015). Shrinking digital gap through automatic generation of WordNet for Indian languages. AI & SOCIETY, 30(2), 215-222. Link