Nishant Mishra
Author directory2026
Investigating Linear Probe Robustness to Linguistic Register, Medical Specialty, and Corpus Shifts in Medical QA
Nishant Mishra | Ameen Abu-Hanna | Iacer Calixto
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Nishant Mishra | Ameen Abu-Hanna | Iacer Calixto
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Linear classifiers trained on hidden states of a large language model (LLM)—*linear probes*—can flag factual errors from a single forward pass. Geometrically, that implies that true and false statements separate along a stable direction in hidden state space, i.e., the *truth direction*. Prior work disagrees on whether this generalises across input shifts, but the disagreement is hard to interpret because cross-dataset probe transfer experiments confound several kinds of input change at once. We isolate three such variables in medical question-answering (QA): writing style (register), domain (medical specialty), and corpus (dataset). We build a benchmark using 500 MedQA entries, each rewritten into four styles (textbook, patient, clinical note, colloquial), annotated with clinical specialty, and grouped with two other exam corpora, MedMCQA and MMLU-medical, for cross-dataset evaluation. Probing four open-weight LLMs (2–8B), we find that the truth direction is largely robust to writing style (mean 𝛥register ≈ 0.10 AUROC on held-out facts) and to medical specialty (𝛥specialty ≈ 0.03), but degrades unevenly across corpora: by 0.12 AUROC on MMLU-medical and by 0.21 on MedMCQA, roughly twice the register gap. The register result replicates with a second generator and carries over to human-written patient questions. The truth direction is therefore largely stable within the medical domain but breaks under some corpus shifts, and question format does not explain the break, which suggests that the signal a linear probe recovers is partly bound to dataset structure rather than to medical knowledge alone.
Differentially Private De-identification of Dutch Clinical Notes: A Comparative Evaluation
Michele Miranda | Xinlan Yan | Nishant Mishra | Rachel Murphy | Ameen Abu Hanna | Sébastien Bratières | Iacer Calixto
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Clinical Natural Language Processing (Clinical NLP) @ LREC 2026
Michele Miranda | Xinlan Yan | Nishant Mishra | Rachel Murphy | Ameen Abu Hanna | Sébastien Bratières | Iacer Calixto
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Clinical Natural Language Processing (Clinical NLP) @ LREC 2026
Protecting patient privacy in clinical narratives is essential for enabling secondary use of healthcare data under regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA. While manual de-identification remains the gold standard, it is costly and slow, motivating the need for automated methods that combine privacy guarantees with high utility. Historically, most automated text de-identification pipelines employed named entity recognition (NER) to identify protected entities for redaction. Although methods based on differential privacy (DP) provide formal privacy guarantees, more recently also large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for text de-identification in the clinical domain. In this work, we present the first comparative study of DP, NER, and LLMs for Dutch clinical text de-identification. We investigate these methods separately as well as hybrid strategies that apply NER or LLM preprocessing prior to DP, and assess performance in terms of privacy leakage and extrinsic evaluation (entity and relation classification). We show that DP mechanisms alone degrade utility substantially, but combining them with linguistic preprocessing, especially LLM-based redaction, significantly improves the privacy–utility trade-off.
2025
MedPath: Multi-Domain Cross-Vocabulary Hierarchical Paths for Biomedical Entity Linking
Nishant Mishra | Wilker Aziz | Iacer Calixto
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Nishant Mishra | Wilker Aziz | Iacer Calixto
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Progress in biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Entity Linking (EL) is currently hindered by a fragmented data landscape, a lack of resources for building explainable models, and the limitations of semantically-blind evaluation metrics. To address these challenges, we present MedPath, a large-scale and multi-domain biomedical EL dataset that builds upon nine existing expert-annotated EL datasets. In MedPath, all entities are 1) normalized using the latest version of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), 2) augmented with mappings to 62 other biomedical vocabularies and, crucially, 3) enriched with full ontological paths—i.e., from general to specific—in up to 11 biomedical vocabularies. MedPath directly enables new research frontiers in biomedical NLP, facilitating training and evaluation of semantic-rich and interpretable EL systems, and the development of the next generation of interoperable and explainable clinical NLP models.
DRISHTIKON: A Multimodal Multilingual Benchmark for Testing Language Models’ Understanding on Indian Culture
Arijit Maji | Raghvendra Kumar | Akash Ghosh | Anushka | Nemil Shah | Abhilekh Borah | Vanshika Shah | Nishant Mishra | Sriparna Saha
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Arijit Maji | Raghvendra Kumar | Akash Ghosh | Anushka | Nemil Shah | Abhilekh Borah | Vanshika Shah | Nishant Mishra | Sriparna Saha
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
We introduce DRISHTIKON, a first-of-its-kind multimodal and multilingual benchmark centered exclusively on Indian culture, designed to evaluate the cultural understanding of generative AI systems. Unlike existing benchmarks with a generic or global scope, DRISHTIKON offers deep, fine-grained coverage across India’s diverse regions, spanning 15 languages, covering all states and union territories, and incorporating over 64,000 aligned text-image pairs. The dataset captures rich cultural themes including festivals, attire, cuisines, art forms, and historical heritage amongst many more. We evaluate a wide range of vision-language models (VLMs), including open-source small and large models, proprietary systems, reasoning-specialized VLMs, and Indic-focused models—across zero-shot and chain-of-thought settings. Our results expose key limitations in current models’ ability to reason over culturally grounded, multimodal inputs, particularly for low-resource languages and less-documented traditions. DRISHTIKON fills a vital gap in inclusive AI research, offering a robust testbed to advance culturally aware, multimodally competent language technologies.
2023
LLM aided semi-supervision for efficient Extractive Dialog Summarization
Nishant Mishra | Gaurav Sahu | Iacer Calixto | Ameen Abu-Hanna | Issam Laradji
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Nishant Mishra | Gaurav Sahu | Iacer Calixto | Ameen Abu-Hanna | Issam Laradji
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Generating high-quality summaries for chat dialogs often requires large labeled datasets. We propose a method to efficiently use unlabeled data for extractive summarization of customer-agent dialogs. In our method, we frame summarization as a question-answering problem and use state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to generate pseudo-labels for a dialog. We then use these pseudo-labels to fine-tune a chat summarization model, effectively transferring knowledge from the large LLM into a smaller specialized model. We demonstrate our method on the TWEETSUMM dataset, and show that using 10% of the original labelled data set we can achieve 65.9/57.0/61.0 ROUGE-1/-2/-L, whereas the current state-of-the-art trained on the entire training data set obtains 65.16/55.81/64.37 ROUGE-1/-2/-L. In other words, in the worst case (i.e., ROUGE-L) we still effectively retain 94.7% of the performance while using only 10% of the data.