About me

I am a postdoctoral researcher in natural language processing at the Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, where I work with Dr. Vered Shwartz. My research develops language technologies for reasoning over social, conversational, and evidence-rich settings, with an emphasis on information seeking, stance understanding, and dialogue systems.

I completed my PhD at the Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, under the supervision of Dr. Evangelos Milios. I previously earned a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from Odesa I. I. Mechnykov National University in Odesa, Ukraine.

Research

My research asks how language technologies can make reliable decisions when the available information is incomplete, ambiguous, or socially situated. I study this question through the following connected directions:

• Information-seeking agents: combine retrieval, uncertainty estimation, and follow-up questioning to gather the evidence needed for reliable answers.
• Social and argumentative reasoning: understand stance, beliefs, and context in dialogues.
• Trustworthy applied NLP systems: support users in high-stakes domains through source-grounded dialogue, interpretable reasoning, and reliable explanations.

Talks

• NLP for Legal Applications UBC CS department retreat, May 4, 2026. [Presentation]

Selected publications

• InfoGatherer: Principled Information Seeking via Evidence Retrieval and Strategic Questioning Maksym Taranukhin, Shuyue Stella Li, Evangelos Milios, Geoff Pleiss, Yulia Tsvetkov, Vered Shwartz. arXiv preprint, 2026. [Paper PDF] [Code repository]
• Stance Reasoner: Zero-Shot Stance Detection on Social Media with Explicit Reasoning Maksym Taranukhin, Vered Shwartz, Evangelos Milios. LREC-COLING, 2024. [Paper PDF] [Code repository]
• Empowering Air Travelers: A Chatbot for Canadian Air Passenger Rights Maksym Taranukhin, Sahithya Ravi, Gabor Lukacs, Evangelos Milios, Vered Shwartz. NLLP Workshop, 2024. [Paper PDF] [Code repository]