Syeda Mahwish | Ph.D. Student at Cornell University

About

I am a second-year graduate student in the Better Outcomes Lab interested in understanding protective factors that support psychological well-being and adaptability following periods of stress and adversity.

I’m also interested in the ways language encodes these psychological processes and how natural language processing (NLP) can be used to study them in a theoretically grounded manner.

I value collaborative, interdisciplinary, and quantitatively grounded research, and I am committed to open and transparent science through the reporting of both significant and non-significant findings. Prior to beginning my Ph.D., I earned an MPH in Biostatistics and Epidemiology and spent three years as a researcher and coordinator in a human-centered NLP lab (HLAB) within the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University.

Outside of research, I am a sister, the eldest daughter of two immigrant parents, and a plant lover. I have many interests, but you will most often find me sketching and painting, cooking, running, and my most expensive hobby: horseback riding. I'm also a coffee and matcha enthusiast, with an extensive home espresso-making setup.

Journey & Updates

Summer 2026

Best Task Description paper award went to SemEval-2026 Task 2: Predicting Variation in Emotional Valence and Arousal over Time from Ecological Essays.

Spring 2026

First Year Special Committee Meeting:

Jonathan Rottenberg, William Hobbs, Anthony Ong, & Marten van Schijndel

Presented first-year research proposals:

"Making Life Go Well: Doing and Being Orientations to Well-Being"
"Linguistic Signatures of Depression, Remission, and Recovery (DRRC): Distinguishing Clinical States Through Natural Language Analysis"

Fall 2025

Started Ph.D. in the Better Outcomes Lab at Cornell University

2025

First-author paper on Resilience using Language Modeling (ReLM) accepted to Journal of Traumatic Stress

2024

Completed Master of Public Health in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Stony Brook University

2022 – 2025

Senior Research Coordinator at HLAB — First introductions to NLP methods for understanding mental health through language

Publications

Soni, N., Schwartz, H. A., Boyd, R. L., Bui, P. H., Mahwish, S., Nilsson, A. H., Ganesan, A. V., Ungar, L., Balasubramanian, N., & Mohammad, S. M. (2026). SemEval-2026 Task 2: Predicting Variation in Emotional Valence and Arousal over Time from Ecological Essays.. Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation. Association for Computational Linguistics., 3731-3752. DOI
Mahwish, S., Boyd, R. L., Varadarajan, V., Kotov, R., Luft, B. J., Schwartz, H. A., & Clouston, S. A. P. (2026). Measuring resilience using language modeling: A computational approach to observing resilience. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 1-14. DOI PDF
Soni, N., Nilsson, A. H., Mahwish, S., Varadarajan, V., Schwartz, H. A., & Boyd, R. L. (2025). Who we are, where we are: Mental health at the intersection of person, situation, and large language models. Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2025), 300–313. DOI
Singh, K., Varadarajan, V., Ganesan, A. V., Nilsson, A. H., Soni, N., Mahwish, S., Chitale, P., Boyd, R. L., Ungar, L., Rosenthal, R. N., & Schwartz, H. A. (2025). Systematic Evaluation of Auto-Encoding and Large Language Model Representations for Capturing Author States and Traits. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, 18955–18973. DOI
Varadarajan, V., Lahnala, A., Vankudari, S., Raghavan, A., Feltman, S., Mahwish, S., Ruggero, C., Kotov, R., & Schwartz, H. A. (2025). Linking language-based distortion detection to mental health outcomes. Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2025), 62–68. DOI
Nilsson, A. H., Schwartz, H. A., Rosenthal, R. N., McKay, J. R., Vu, H., Cho, Y. M., Mahwish, S., Ganesan, A. V., & Ungar, L. (2024). Language-based EMA assessments help understand problematic alcohol consumption. PLOS ONE, 19(3), e0298300. DOI
Matero, M., Vu, H., Nilsson, A., Mahwish, S., Cho, Y. M., McKay, J., Eichstaedt, J., Rosenthal, R., Ungar, L., & Schwartz, H. A. (2024). Using Daily Language to Understand Drinking: Multi-Level Longitudinal Differential Language Analysis. Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024), 133–144. DOI
Nilsson, A., Boyd, R. L., Ganesan, A. V., Kjell, O. N. E., Mahwish, S., Huang, H., & Schwartz, H. A. (2024). Language-based assessments for experienced well-being: Accuracy and external validity across behaviors, traits, and states. Preprint
Varadarajan, V., Mahwish, S., Liu, X., Buffolino, J., Luhmann, C. C., Boyd, R. L., & Schwartz, H. A. (2025). Capturing Human Cognitive Styles with Language: Towards an Experimental Evaluation Paradigm. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2025 (Short Papers). DOI
Varadarajan, V., Juhng, S., Mahwish, S., Liu, X., Luby, J., Luhmann, C., & Schwartz, H. A. (2023). Transfer and Active Learning for Dissonance Detection: Addressing the Rare-Class Challenge. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), 11923–11936. DOI

About

Journey & Updates

Research Interests

Publications