Nafise Sadat Moosavi

Nafise Sadat Moosavi

Lecturer in NLP at the Computer Science Department of the University of Sheffield

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

My research focuses on understanding, evaluating, and advancing language and foundation models, with particular emphasis on their reasoning capabilities, robustness, fairness, and efficiency. A central theme of my work is developing rigorous evaluation methods and benchmarks to identify model capabilities, limitations, and failure modes, and using these insights to inform the development of more reliable, capable, and responsible models.

I am particularly interested in understanding how models learn, represent, and reason about information, including numerical, linguistic, and cultural knowledge. I am also interested in exploring new model architectures, training and inference methods, and the development of novel foundation models. My broader research interests include multimodal learning, AI for Science, and linguistically and psycholinguistically informed approaches to understanding model behaviour.

PhD Opportunities (Rare Sightings Only)

Please note: Any funded PhD opportunities will be explicitly advertised here if they become available. I genuinely appreciate the time and effort prospective students put into their emails, especially those who take the time to familiarise themselves with my research and tailor their enquiries accordingly. However, given the overwhelming number of emails academics receive, I regret that I am unable to respond to individual enquiries about funding or unadvertised positions. Please do not interpret a lack of response as a reflection of your qualifications or the quality of your email. Thank you for your understanding.

If you have secured your own funding or are applying for an external scholarship and are interested in working on these or related research topics, please feel free to get in touch with a brief description of your research interests and funding arrangements.

Academic Service

Senior Area Chair

  • EACL 2027, NAACL 2027
  • EMNLP 2026: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness
  • ACL 2026 (Outstanding Senior Area Chair Award): Ethics, Bias, and Fairness
  • EACL 2026: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
  • 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 Organisation

Professional Service

  • Demonstration co-chair: EACl 2026
  • Workshop co-chair: EACL 2024
  • Student volunteer co-chair: EMNLP 2026, EMNLP 2024
  • Best paper award committee: EMNLP 2023
  • Standing Reviewer for the Computational Linguistics Journal
  • Editorial Board Member for the Northern European Journal of Language Technology (NEJLT)

Invited Talks