Narratives are central to how humans communicate, reason, and make sense of their experiences. They are a rich source of day-to-day knowledge and contain many social and moral norms. Therefore, narratives can be used to instill human-like communication, commonsense knowledge, and reasoning capabilities in machines. Towards this goal, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) community, in particular, have long been interested in understanding and generating narratives. While understanding and generating narratives are natural for most people, it remains an elusive goal for AI and NLP systems, in part because it requires an understanding of key narrative elements and how they evolve and drive the story forward.

In this dissertation, we approach these challenges by designing new tasks as well as resources specifically aimed toward advancing narrative understanding and generation models. We propose to model and incorporate narrative elements that contribute to a good story, such as plot, characters, and emotions. We also introduce new modeling frameworks to incorporate user specifications in the form of narrative elements into the generation process.

First, we model the plot of the story via user-provided cue phrases as a narrative element in an interactive generation framework. We present two content-inducing approaches based on the Transformer Network for interactively incorporating cue phrases when automatically generating stories. Next, we present to model the evolution of emotions in neural story generation. We develop methods to generate stories that adhere to desired emotion arcs. We specifically designed two emotion-consistency rewards in a Reinforcement Learning framework to regularize the story generation. We then study character(s) as narrative elements. We introduce a new dataset, LiSCU, and tasks for assessing machines' understanding of characters which is of utmost importance for understanding narratives. Lastly, we focus on entities (and not just characters) as a narrative element. We propose a real-world application of generating narratives about entities grounded in world knowledge. Towards this, we present a new dataset, ranking-based generation models, and an evaluation metric of factuality.

Positive sense RNA viruses play a central role in the field of virology in general and agriculture in particular. Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) is a positive sense RNA virus, playing an important role in agriculture because of its broad host range, as it can infect over 1200 species of plants. CMV is sometime accompanied by satellite RNA, a 336 nucleotides long noncoding RNA, which can either ameliorate or intensify symptom expression by the virus. CMV is a multipartite virus, requiring a constellation of three virion particles to initiate a successful infection. Chapter 1 of this dissertation focuses on optimization the Agrobacterium cell concentration of three genomic RNA agroconstructs of Brome mosaic virus (BMV), a widely used model system to study replication, recombination and packaging in positive sense RNA viruses. In this chapter, the focus is made on understanding effect of optical density (O.D600) of Agrobacterium cell cultures on synchronized infection followed viral gene expression. Chapter 2 is largely focused on understanding the mechanism regulating nuclear import of satellite RNA (satRNA) in the presence and absence of CMV. It was identified that Bromodomain containing RNA binding protein (BRP1), an ortholog of which has been previously documented to play an important role in the life cycle of Potato Spindle Tuber Viroid (PSTVd), plays a crucial role in the nuclear import of satRNA. Information garnered in this chapter helped bridging the evolutionary gap between satellite RNA and PSTVd. In Chapter 3, an attempt is made to understand the proteome interacting with BRP1, whose functionality in a plant is yet unknown. By using proteomic approaches, we were able to understand proteome interacting with BRP1 by itself, or in the presence of CMV or satellite RNA in Nicotiana benthamiana plants. Chapter 4 is an extension of chapter 3, where single gene knockout lines of Arabidopsis thaliana of short listed host proteins from chapter 3 were tested for their role in CMV replication, and specificaly the role of Glyceraldehyde 3 phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) in replicase complex assembly/stability was studied. Understanding the shift in proteome of host in case of a satRNA is a daunting task (due to the inability of satRNA to code for proteins), hence, we employed riboproteomic approach in Chapter 5 to short list host proteins interacting with satellite RNA in plus- or minus- sense, in the presence or absence of CMV. Viral protein-protein interactions play an important role in the replication of positive sense RNA viruses. Chapter 6, and 7 focus on comparative study of protein protein interactions for two important members of Bromoviridae family. In chapter 6, live cell imaging using BiFC analysis helped us visualize protein protein interactions and subcellular localization of BMV proteins.. Finally, in Chapter 7, we provide an extensive protein-protein interaction study of CMV viral proteins in vivo using Bimolecular Fluorescence complementation (BiFC) assay.

This dissertation discusses some of the causes and consequences of inequality, vertical and horizontal, some theoretically and others empirically. In doing so, I try to touch upon old and new themes in the economics literature, as old as rent seeking and as new as the effect of cultural norms.

The first essay reflects on the inequality of opportunity as manifest in the quality of education available to families in India. The paper explores the relative roles of the quality of schools and household attributes on a household’s choice of school in India. I find that income is the most important predictor of a household’s choice of school, with a doubling of per capita income increasing the likelihood of choosing a private school over a public school by 10 percentage points. Public schools can rarely compete with private schools even with comparable infrastructure and free school supplies. As incomes rise (India’s GDP has nearly doubled in the last 10 years), it is reasonable to expect that there will be de facto higher demand for private schooling and not public.

The second essay is a theoretical examination of inequality-generating rent seeking and the feedback mechanism between the two. In this paper, I model rent seeking in an unequal endowment economy to analyze the conditions under which more inequality leads to more rent seeking. I find that, when rent-seeking costs are fixed, a more unequal economy fosters a greater proportion of rentiers. When rent-seeking costs are flexible, the proportion of rentiers shrinks with more inequality. However, both the quantity of rents per person and the resources wasted in pursuing rent-seeking activities increase.

In the third essay, I link the education choices of women to gender-specific norms of marriage. Hypergamy (the practice of women "marrying up" by caste, age, education or any indicator of economic well-being) implies that too much education could lower women’s prospects of finding a suitable spouse. To understand its impact on pre-marital investments in education, this project studies women’s choice of educational attainment as a function of men’s. To do so, I examine the impact of an exogenous change in the schooling level of men on the schooling level of women in the United States in the last 50 years. The source of variation is the change in US' immigration policy in 1965, which has been documented to have considerably altered the demography and skill pool in the US since 1965. I find evidence of a positive relationship between men and women's education outcomes. This is a result suggestive of hypergamy and its dragging effect on women's education. The result is robust to the use of another control group: immigrant women in the US.

This dissertation explores how Indian anticolonialists Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928) and Bhai Parmanand (1876-1947), through their writings and organizations, as well as their lived traumas and triumphs, directly contributed to the development of Hindutva on a global scale. Through the lenses of global revolutions, intellectual history, and connected histories, this dissertation finds that Rai and Parmanand utilized their early experiences with the Arya Samaj, their years in exile, and their time in prison to construct a Hindu nation that embodied resilience, universal enlightenment, and civilizational prestige. Through a reading of globally conceived biographical, autobiographical, and suprabiographical texts, the intersection between interlocking national movements and international travel narratives demonstrates the complexities from which individuals such as Rai and Parmanand drew inspiration. Their references to “great men of the world” and national “heroes” such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Swami Dayanand provided a global archetype for their worldbuilding agenda. By differentiating between biographical, autobiographical, and suprabiographical writings, this dissertation uses prison narratives to connect real life trauma to the nationalization of the body and the elevation of heroic values and stoicism, enriching Hindu intellectualism in the early twentieth century. To add dimension to this already multifaceted intellectual current, conversations on Hindutva extend beyond both Indian shores and Hindu minds by examining a wide range of archival sources from the US, Britain, and India. The globality of Hindu intellectualism, and Hindutva following V.D. Savarkar’s Essentials of Hindutva (1923), demonstrates how the flow of ideas and the interconnectedness of people affected transformations within its development and, ironically, set it on a dangerous course for present-day communalism and ethnonationalism. Through Rai’s and Parmanand’s connected histories with Indian and non-Indian revolutionaries and their personal experiences of traumas, this dissertation finds Hindutva to be sticky, incorporating global intellectual networks, global revolutionary activities, global traumas, and global imaginings of the future as well as competing with alternative global "-isms" such as imperialism, pan-Islamism, international socialism, and global capitalism all within a movement that was always global in scale and in aspiration.