BesmAllah

I am a Lecturer (~Assistant Professor) in Natural Language Processing at the Computer Science Department of the University of Sheffield. Before joining the University of Sheffield, I was a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Iryna Gurevych at the UKP Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt. I got my PhD degree from Heidelberg University where I was supervised by Prof. Michael Strube. I have studied at Alzahra University and the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran for my BSc and MSc in computer science.

Reseach Interests

If you are a self-funded Ph.D. student and would like to work with me, I am interested to work on evaluating and improving (1) fairness & robustness, (2) accessibility, (3) reasoning skills, and (4) efficiency of language models. Apart from these, I am interested in coreference resolution and interesting psycholinguistic analyses of text ot multimodal inputs.

Academic Service

Senior Area Chair

  • ACL 2025: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness
  • COLING 2025: Language Resources and Evaluation
  • EMNLP 2024: Special Theme: Efficiency in Model Algorithms, Training, and Inference
  • EACL 2023: Ethical and Sustainable NLP
  • NAACL 2022: Discourse and Pragmatics

Area Chair

  • ACL 2024 (Efficiency), LREC-COLING 2024 (Lexicon and Semantics)
  • EMNLP 2023 (Semantics: Lexical, Sentence Level, Document Level, Textual Inference), ACL 2023 (Discourse and Pragmatics)
  • EMNLP 2022 (Efficient Methods for NLP)

Workshop Organization

Invited Talks

  • June 2024: 3rd Cardiff NLP Summer Workshop
  • Nov 2023: Cambridge NLP seminar series
  • Oct 2023: OFAI's (Austrian Research Institute for AI) 2023 Fall Lecture Series
  • June 2023: Interactive AI CDT in Bristol
  • Dec 2022: CS Department at TeIAS, Tehran, Iran
  • Nov 2022: Computer Science Department of Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL)
  • Nov 2021: Computer Science Department of Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL)

Other Roles

  • Student volunteer teams co-chair for EMNLP 2024
  • Best paper award committee for EMNLP 2023
  • Standing Reviewer for the Computational Linguistics Journal
  • Editorial Board Member for the Northern European Journal of Language Technology (NEJLT)