Kaavya Chaparala

About Me

I am a researcher in the 3rd year of my PhD in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). My advisor is Anjalie Field. I am affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) and the Data Science and AI Institute (DSAI).

I work at the intersection of speech, natural language processing, and computational social science. I use speech and text as data to answer questions about social phenomena with a particular focus on extracting insights from noisy, real-world speech and text.

Publications

1. Kaavya Chaparala, Su Huang, Stephen L. Morgan, Rhiannon N. Miller, Anjalie Field. Pretrained ASR Pseudo-labeling for Noisy Police Audio. Accepted to SLT 2026 [paper]


2. Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Jesus Villalba Lopez, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Peter Viechnicki, Najim Dehak. Beyond Transcripts: Iterative Peer-Editing with Audio Unlocks High-Quality Human Summaries of Conversational Speech. The Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026) 2026. [paper]


3. Tom Lupicki, Lavanya Shankar, Kaavya Chaparala, David Yarowsky. JHU’s submission to the AmericasNLP 2025 Shared Task on the Creation of Educational Materials for Indigenous Languages. Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP). 2025. [paper]


4. Jiaqi Chen, Richard Antonello, Kaavya Chaparala, Coen Arrow, Nima Mesgarani Quantifying Semantic Functional Specialization in the Brain Using Encoding Models of Natural Language Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics 2024. [paper]


5. Kaavya Chaparala, Guido Zarrella, Bruce Torres Fischer, Larry Kimura, Oiwi Parker Jones Mai Ho`omāuna i ka `Ai: Language Models Improve Automatic Speech Recognition in Hawaiian. The Fourth Workshop on Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP-IV) at NeurIPS 2024. [paper]