I am an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at UT Austin, and a Harrington Faculty Fellow for 2025-26. I am a member of the Computational Linguistics Research Group and also the wider NLP Research Community at UT. I maintain a courtesy appointment at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

My research program lies at the intersection of Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence. I am primarily interested in characterizing the statistical mechanisms that underlie the acquisition and generalization of complex linguistic phenomena and conceptual meaning. To this end, I: (1) develop methods to evaluate and analyze AI models from the perspective of semantic cognition; and (2) use AI models as simulated learners to test and generate novel hypotheses about language acquisition and generalization. My research has been recognized with awards at EACL 2023, ACL 2023, and EMNLP 2024!

Previously, I was a Research Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute located on the University of Chicago campus. Before, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Linguistics department at UT Austin, working with Dr. Kyle Mahowald. Before that, I was a PhD student at Purdue University, where I worked on Natural Language Understanding with Dr. Julia Taylor Rayz at the AKRaNLU Lab. I also worked closely with Dr. Allyson Ettinger and her lab at UChicago.

I am the author of minicons, a python library that facilitates large scale behavioral analyses of transformer language models.

My email is kmisra [at] utexas [dot] edu.^{[why is it like that?]}

Representative Papers

• Kanishka Misra, Julia Rayz, and Allyson Ettinger. 2023. COMPS: Conceptual Minimal Pair Sentences for testing Robust Property Knowledge and its Inheritance in Pre-trained Language Models. EACL 2023. Best Paper Award.

• Kanishka Misra and Kyle Mahowald. 2024. Language Models Learn Rare Phenomena from Less Rare Phenomena: The Case of the Missing AANNs. EMNLP 2024. Outstanding Paper Award.

• Kanishka Misra and Najoung Kim. 2024. A systematic framework for generating novel experimental hypotheses from language models. arxiv preprint.

• Yulu Qin,^* Dheeraj Varghese,^* Adam Dahlgren Lindström, Lucia Donatelli, Kanishka Misra,^† and Najoung Kim.^† 2025. Vision-and-Language Training Helps Deploy Taxonomic Knowledge but Does Not Fundamentally Alter It. NeurIPS 2025.

• Tianyang Xu, Marcelo Sandoval-Castaneda, Karen Livescu, Greg Shakhnarovich, and Kanishka Misra. 2026. Cross-Modal Taxonomic Generalization in (Vision-) Language Models. ACL 2026.

Some upcoming talks:

• Keynote at the International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG) - June 4-7
• Keynote at the 1st Workshop for Computational Developmental Linguistics at ACL 2026 - July 3-4.
• Frontiers Lecture at the 2026 School on Analytical Connectionism at Chalmers University, Gothenberg!