I'm currently an assistant professor at ECE, University of Tehran. I'm also co-director of the large language model (LLM) lab at TEIAS. 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. 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, creativity and diversity, learning modular and efficient models, and interpretation. For my publications, please visit my Google Scholar page.

News and Activities

  • A paper accepted to ACL 2026 (main)
  • A paper accepted to EACL 2026 (main)
  • Serving as Senior Area Chair for ACL 2026
  • Two papers accepted to EMNLP 2025 (Findings)
  • A paper accepted to ACL 2025 (main)
  • Two papers accepted to NAACL 2025 (main)
  • Two papers accepted to COLING 2025
  • Serving as Senior Area Chair for ACL 2025
  • 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

  • Large Language Models (Graduate, Co-Instructor), University of Tehran and TEIAS, Spring 2024-2026.
  • Foundation Models in Natural Language Processing (Graduate), University of Tehran, Fall 2021-2023.
  • Natural Language Processing (Graduate), University of Tehran, Spring 2021.
  • Introduction to Data Science (Undergrad, Co-Instructor), Spring 2024-2026
  • Artificial Intelligence (Undergrad), University of Tehran, 2021-2026.

Graduated students

  • MS: Mohsen Fayyaz, Ali Edalat, Sahar Rajabi, Milad Reisi, Ali Zolnour, Samin Mehdizadeh, Hamed Amiri, Mostafa Masoudi, Sepehr Kamahi, Nikoo Naghavian, Danial Namazi, Mohammadreza Elmi, Faezeh Hosseini, Melika Nobakhtian, Armin Tourajmehr
  • BS: Ehsan Aghazadeh, Sara Tavakoli, Mahdiyar Aliakbar Alavi, Sina Pakseresht, Kasra Karaji, Sepiedeh Rahimian, Tanin Zeraati, Amirhossein Dabiri, Mohammadreza Bakhtiari, Shayan Vassef, Nilufar Mohammadi, Paria Khoshtab, Ali Akhgari, Hadi Babalou, Rashid Ahmadi, Mahdi Nouri