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.

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

Other things:

• I am the author of minicons, a python library that facilitates large scale behavioral analyses of transformer language models.
• I used to co-organize the UChicago/TTIC NLP Seminar, along with the wonderful Mina Lee and Zhewei Sun.
• I spent Fall 2022 as a Research Intern at Google AI working on multi-hop reasoning and language models.
• In summer of 2022, I hosted a two part discussion group on Neural Nets for Cognition @ CogSci 2022

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. Generating novel experimental hypotheses from language models: A case study on cross-dative generalization. arxiv preprint.

• Juan Diego Rodriguez, Aaron Mueller, and Kanishka Misra. 2025. Characterizing the Role of Similarity in the Property Inferences of Language Models. NAACL 2025.

• 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.

Some upcoming talks:

• Keynote at Texas Linguistics Society - Feb 20.
• Invited Talk at the University of Amsterdam - April 2.
• 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.