Dr. Arpan Mandal

I am currently serving as an Assistant Professor at the Manipal Institute of Technology, MAHE, Manipal, since March 2025. My research and teaching activities are centered around Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), Few-shot Learning, Legal Data Analytics, and Information Retrieval. I focus on designing robust, application-oriented NLP systems that can be effectively deployed in real-world scenarios. In addition to my teaching responsibilities, I actively mentor both undergraduate and postgraduate students, guiding them in research projects, problem formulation, and experimental design within these domains.

Prior to this role, I worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Southampton (UoS) from December 2022 to September 2024, under the supervision of Dr. Stuart Middleton. My research during this period focused on developing few-shot learning methodologies for identifying instances of “sharenting” in social media—specifically, detecting cases where parents may inadvertently share sensitive information about their children. This work involved the design of data-efficient models capable of operating under limited annotated data conditions, with strong implications for online safety and privacy.

I completed my Ph.D. at the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur, supported by the Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme (MeitY, Government of India), under the guidance of Prof. Sekhar Mandal and Dr. Saptarshi Ghosh. My doctoral research, titled “Catchphrases in Legal Case Documents: Identification and Applications,” focused on information retrieval from Indian Supreme Court case documents, including tasks such as catchphrase extraction, extractive summarization, and identification of legal precedents. Following my Ph.D., I briefly worked as a Research Assistant at IIT Kharagpur on the “Smart Legal Consultant: AI-based Legal Analytics” project, where I contributed to developing models for predicting applicable legal statutes based on case facts.