Scripts Through Time: A Survey of the Evolving Role of Transliteration in NLP
ACL Findings 2026
arXivProject pageCode4 citations
Deepon Halder
I build software close to the metal: embedded systems, networking, and the quiet infrastructure that keeps routers honest.
Kolkata · IIEST Shibpur · also known as neuralnets
About
I’m an undergraduate at IIEST Shibpur, joining Cisco this spring as a software engineering intern. Most of my attention now goes to embedded systems and networking: firmware, router software, and the testing that proves it works long before it reaches a rack.
Last summer at Cisco I built testing infrastructure for router-software mock validation and automated internal engineering workflows. Before that I did research at Approximate Labs and at AI4Bharat, IIT Madras, with Dr. Raj Dabre. If something here is useful to you, or confusing, write to me.
Now Improving ASR models at Alma.
News
All news →- Joined Alma as an intern, improving ASR models.
- Joined Approximate Labs as an intern, on reinforcement-learning research.
- Joined Cisco as a technical intern.
- Preferences of a Voice-First Nation accepted to INTERSPEECH 2026.
- Scripts Through Time accepted to ACL Findings 2026.
- Top-b and Multilingual TinyStories preprints are out.
Selected papers
All 8 papers →Preferences of a Voice-First Nation: Large-Scale Pairwise Evaluation and Preference Analysis for TTS in Indian Languages
INTERSPEECH 2026
arXiv1 citation
RiddleBench: A New Generative Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs
EACL Findings 2026
arXivProject pageHugging Face2 citations
Not All Time Is Gregorian: Evaluating LLMs on Cultural Calendar Systems
ICBINB @ ICLR 2026
Top-b: Entropic Regulation of Relative Probability Bands in Autoregressive Language Processes
Preprint
arXiv0 citations
CycleDistill: Bootstrapping Machine Translation using LLMs with Cyclical Distillation
MELT @ COLM 2025 · WAT @ IJCNLP-AACL 2025
arXivProject pageCode1 citation
Things I’ve made
latteditAn online LaTeX editor with a live PDF preview, Overleaf import, and error logs explained in plain language.lattedit.xyz →PaperCodePractise implementing machine-learning papers, check your ideas with tests, and track how far you’ve come.papercode.in →solAccCompany-specific practice for online assessments: MCQs, coding labs, puzzles and interview prep.solacc.xyz →neugradA small autograd engine in Python and NumPy, written to teach how backpropagation really works.GitHub →
All 17 projects
Where I've worked
Alma Inc.Intern · improving ASR models
Approximate LabsIntern · reinforcement-learning research
CiscoTechnical intern · router software testing infrastructure
AI4Bharat, IIT MadrasResearch intern · multilingual NLP and language modeling
IIT BhubaneswarResearch intern
IIEST ShibpurResearch apprentice
Achievements along the way
- Winner
Cody Challenge 2025Finished a month-long MATLAB course, then solved 20 of 20 problems in the contest.
- Winner
Braindead HackathonFine-tuned Mistral 7B to summarise text.
- Runner-up
MCode MetallumSecond prize for a modern to-do app.
- Runner-up
Startup Challenge, IIESTSecond prize for Auto@Kol, connecting Kolkata’s auto-rickshaw network more efficiently.
- Third
Hacknovare, InstruoThird prize for a mental-health management app.
- Selected
Cohere ML School 2025Couldn’t attend because of earlier commitments.
- Selected
The Residency, Feb 2025Bangalore cohort. Didn’t go.
- Scholar
KVPY 2021 SAExtra merit list.
- Scholar
JBNSTSAmong the top 250 students in West Bengal.
Talks and conversations
- Why LLMs think in English, and what it costs them · Lossfunk · recording soon
- CycleDistill · WAT 2025
- Down the research rabbit hole · RaSoR, IIT Madras
- A podcast with Siddhanth · IIT BHU
- GDSC NIT Jalandhar talk · recording
I also review for EMNLP, COLM and ACL, and did ethics review for NeurIPS 2026. Off the clock I keep a quiet list of every film I’ve seen in a theatre since 2023.
If you can’t explain something to a first-year student, then you haven’t really understood it.
— Richard Feynman