I'm currently an assistant professor at ECE, University of Tehran. Before, I was a senior researcher at Microsoft Montreal, where I worked on natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning.

Before joining Microsoft in 2017, I did my PhD in computer science at CIS, University of Munich (LMU) and my MSc at Sharif University of Technology and BSc at University of Tehran.

As professional activities, I co-organized two workshops on Subword and Character level models in NLP (SCLeM) at EMNLP 2017 and NAACL 2018. I was Area Chair at ACL 2021 and Remote Presentation Co-chair at the same venue. I have also served as a program committee member at various NLP and AI conferences: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, CIKM, COLING, EACL, CoNLL, LREC.

These days, my research is predominantly focused on topics related to building, improving, using, and analyzing large language models (LLMs). Topics include: studying the multilinguality of LLMs and especially how figurative and factual knowledge are represented, learning modular and efficient models, and interpretation and explanation methods. I'm working mainly with MS and BS students.

News and Activities

  • A paper accepted to LREC-COLING 2024
  • Serving as an area chair for ACL 2024
  • Serving as an area chair for EMNLP 2023
  • A paper accepted at EMNLP 2023 (Findings)
  • Two papers accepted at ACL 2023
  • A paper accepted at EMNLP 2022 (about: analyzing word-overlap bias in NLI.)
  • A paper accepted at ACL 2022 (about: analyzing metaphorical information in pre-trained language models.)
  • A paper accepted at NAACL 2022 (about: a better interpretation method for Transformer models in NLP.)
  • A paper accepted at LREC 2022 (about: a new dataset (PerCQA) for community question answering.)
  • A paper accepted at Semantic Web Journal (about: a new question-answer matching model.)

Teaching

  • Foundation Models in Natural Language Processing (Graduate), University of Tehran, Falls 2021-2023.
  • Natural Language Processing (Graduate), University of Tehran, Spring 2021.
  • Introduction to Data Science (Undergrad), Spring 2024
  • Artificial Intelligence (Undergrad), University of Tehran, Spring 2021, Fall 2021.

Current students

  • MS: Samin Mehdizadeh, Hamed Amiri, Mostafa Masoudi, Sepehr Kamahi, Nikoo Naghavian, Danial Namazi, Mohammadreza Elmi
  • BS: Paria Khoshtab, Ali Akhgari, Hadi Babalou, Nesa Abbasi

Graduated students

  • MS: Mohsen Fayyaz, Ali Edalat, Sahar Rajabi, Milad Reisi, Ali Zolnour
  • BS: Ehsan Aghazadeh, Sara Tavakoli, Mahdiyar Aliakbar Alavi, Sina Pakseresht, Kasra Karaji, Sepiedeh Rahimian, Tanin Zeraati, Amirhossein Dabiri, Mohammadreza Bakhtiari, Shayan Vassef, Nilufar Mohammadi