Debjit Paul

Hi there! I'm a Research Scientist at Huawei Noah Ark's Lab, London. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Antoine Bosselut, Boi Faltings, and Robert West at EPFL. Before EPFL, I completed my Ph.D. under the supervision of Anette Frank in the Department of Computational Linguistics at Heidelberg University and was also a part of the Research Training Group AIPHES.
My overarching research objective is to enhance the reasoning capabilities of artificial agents by advancing their ability to understand the complex interplay between language, knowledge representation, and cognitive reasoning processes. To accomplish this goal, I have focused my investigations on three areas:

Reasoning with knowledge representations - AI agents must be grounded by knowledge dynamics to generalize to unseen situations robustly. My research has focused on designing computational models capable of reasoning over knowledge.
Learning to generate explanations for reasoning - When a model explains its decision-making steps or logical steps it took to reach that conclusion, it enhances transparency and helps build trust in the system. My research has focused on designing computational models that generate explanations before making the final decisions.
Aligning Models with Human or AI Feedback - Text generation models are observed to display undesired and inconsistent behaviours, such as hallucination and unfaithful reasoning. My research has focused on designing methods to rectify the undesired behaviours of text generation models through interaction.

News

May 4, 2025	One paper, FIPO: Fallacy-Informed Preference Optimisation, won the Outstanding Paper Award 🏆 at NAACL 2025
Jan 23, 2025	One paper is accepted at ICLR 2025 (INCLUDE)
Jan 23, 2025	One paper is accepted at NAACL 2025 (FIPO: Fallacy-Informed Preference Optimization)
Nov 7, 2024	Talk at Microsoft Research (MSR), Bangalore, India.
Sep 22, 2024	Two papers are accepted at EMNLP 2024

latest posts

Apr 4, 2023	REFINER:Reasoning Feedback on Intermediate Representations
Apr 23, 2022	Social Commonsense Reasoning with Structured Knowledge in Text
Oct 11, 2019	Graph-based Multi-Hop Commonsense Knowledge

selected publications

2025

A Logical Fallacy-Informed Framework for Argument Generation

Luca Mouchel, Debjit Paul, Shaobo Cui, Robert West, Antoine Bosselut, and Boi Faltings

In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), Apr 2025

Bib PDF Code

@inproceedings{mouchel-etal-2025-logical,
  title = {A Logical Fallacy-Informed Framework for Argument Generation},
  author = {Mouchel, Luca and Paul, Debjit and Cui, Shaobo and West, Robert and Bosselut, Antoine and Faltings, Boi},
  editor = {Chiruzzo, Luis and Ritter, Alan and Wang, Lu},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  month = apr,
  year = {2025},
  address = {Albuquerque, New Mexico},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.374/},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.374},
  pages = {7296--7314},
  isbn = {979-8-89176-189-6},
}

2024

Making Reasoning Matter: Measuring and Improving Faithfulness of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Debjit Paul, Robert West, Antoine Bosselut, and Boi Faltings

In Findings of EMNLP: 2024, Nov 2024

Bib PDF Code

@inproceedings{paul2024reasoning,
  title = {Making Reasoning Matter: Measuring and Improving Faithfulness of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning},
  author = {Paul, Debjit and West, Robert and Bosselut, Antoine and Faltings, Boi},
  month = nov,
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  booktitle = {Findings of EMNLP: 2024},
  url = {https://debjitpaul.github.io/reasoningmatter},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.13950},
}

REFINER: Reasoning Feedback on Intermediate Representations

Debjit Paul, Mete Ismayilzada, Maxime Peyrard, Beatriz Borges, Antoine Bosselut, Robert West, and Boi Faltings

In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Mar 2024

Bib PDF Code

@inproceedings{Paul2023REFINERRF,
  title = {REFINER: Reasoning Feedback on Intermediate Representations},
  author = {Paul, Debjit and Ismayilzada, Mete and Peyrard, Maxime and Borges, Beatriz and Bosselut, Antoine and West, Robert and Faltings, Boi},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  month = mar,
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.67},
}

2023

CRoW: Benchmarking Commonsense Reasoning in Real-World Tasks

Mete Ismayilzada, Debjit Paul, Syrielle Montariol, Mor Geva, and Antoine Bosselut

In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Dec 2023

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{ismayilzada2023crow,
  title = {CRoW: Benchmarking Commonsense Reasoning in Real-World Tasks},
  author = {Ismayilzada, Mete and Paul, Debjit and Montariol, Syrielle and Geva, Mor and Bosselut, Antoine},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
  month = dec,
  year = {2023},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.607},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.607},
  pages = {9785--9821},
}