Contact
Pfaffenwaldring 5 b
70569 Stuttgart
Deutschland
Room: 01.011
Office Hours
Monday to Friday - 3:00 - 5:00 pm
Subject
I'm a final-year Ph.D. researcher in the MUDCAT Project supervised by Prof. Dr. Sabine Schulte im Walde (Uni Stuttgart) and Dr. Diego Frassinelli (LMU), working on multimodal representations of abstract and concrete concepts. My research explores how abstract and concrete concepts differ, with a focus on how they are represented and aligned across language and vision. I'm especially interested in how computational models — such as Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP and SigLIP — process semantic information, and how their representations compare to human cognition.
Prior to my Ph.D., I worked as a Senior Staff Research Engineer at IBM Research, India, contributing to both research and product-oriented projects. These included tasks such as Text-to-SQL conversion, sarcasm generation, and automation of invoice processing systems. I hold an integrated B.Tech + M.Tech degree in Information Technology from IIIT Bangalore, where I was awarded the gold medal for all-round excellence.
My current work involves analyzing computational models that are better aligned with how humans represent and interpret abstract and concrete concepts.
Research Interests · Concreteness & Abstractness · Multimodal NLP · Vision-Language Models · Text Generation
Project Page: Multimodal Dimensions and Computational Applications of Abstractness (MUDCAT)
Group Page: Semrel Website
- Tarun Tater, Sabine Schulte Im Walde, and Diego Frassinelli. 2024. Unveiling the mystery of visual attributes of concrete and abstract concepts: Variability, nearest neighbors, and challenging categories. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 21581–21597, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Tarun Tater, Sabine Schulte Im Walde, and Diego Frassinelli. 2024. Evaluating Semantic Relations in Predicting Textual Labels for Images of Abstract and Concrete Concepts. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages 214–220, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Tarun Tater, Diego Frassinelli, and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2022. Concreteness vs. Abstractness: A Selectional Preference Perspective. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop, pages 92–98, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Abhijit Mishra, Tarun Tater, and Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2019. A Modular Architecture for Unsupervised Sarcasm Generation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 6144–6154, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
For a more detailed list, please see: Google Scholar
| 04/2022 - Present | Ph.D. Researcher at IMS, University of Stuttgart |
| 06/2019 - 03/2022 | Senior Staff Research Engineer, IBM Research, India |
| 08/2017 - 05/2019 | Staff Research Engineer, IBM Research, India |
| 08/2012 - 07/ 2017 | Student, Integrated Bachelor's and Master's in IT from International Institute of Information Technology - Bangalore. |