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 on Twitter data.
If you are not self-funded, I don’t currently have an open position, but you can instead apply for our Center for Doctoral Training for Speech and Language Technologies.
News
- Jan 2023: two papers accepted at EACL: “Transformers with Learnable Activation Functions” with Haishuo Fang, Ji-Ung Lee, and Iryna Gurevych accepted at findings, and “Lessons Learned from a Citizen Science Project for Natural Language Processing” with Jan-Christoph Klie, Ji-Ung Lee, Kevin Stowe, Gözde Şahin, Luke Bates, Dominic Petrak, Richard Eckart de Castilho and Iryna Gurevych accepted at main
- Dec 2022: will serve as an area chair for the ACL2023 “Discourse and Pragmatics” track
- Nov 2022: will be serving as an editorial board member for the Northern European Journal of Language Technology (NEJLT)
- Nov 2022: gave an invited talk about “Learnable Activation Functions in Transformer-based Architectures” at the Computer Science Department of Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL). The talk was summerizing Transformers with Learnable Activation Functions and Adaptable Adapters papers
- Oct 2022: Layer or Representation Space: What makes BERT-based Metrics Robust? is selected as an outstanding paper at COLING 2022
- Oct 2022: will serve as a senior area chair for the “Ethical and Sustainable NLP” at EACL 2023
- Sep 2022: Our paper Evaluating Coreference Resolvers on Community-based Question Answering: From Rule-based to State of the Art with Haixia Chai, Iryna Gurevych, and Michael Strube is accepted at the CRAC 2022 workshop. The paper ended up at a workshop, but if you are interested in coreference resolution, it is definitely worth a read
- August 2022: Our paper “Layer or Representation Space: What makes BERT-based Metrics Robust?” with Doan Nam Long Vu and Steffen Eger is accepted at COLING 2022
- May 2022: will serve as an area chair for “Efficient Methods for NLP” at EMNLP 2022
- April 2022: Our papers “Adaptable Adapters” with Quentin Delfosse, Kristian Kersting, and Iryna Gurevych and “Falsesum: Generating Document-level NLI Examples for Recognizing Factual Inconsistency in Summarization” with Prasetya Ajie Utama, Joshua Bambrick, and Iryna Gurevych are accepted at NAACL 2022
- April 2022: Our paper “The Universal Anaphora Scorer” with Juntao Yu, Sopan Khosla, Silviu Paun, Sameer Pradhan, and Massimo Poesio is accepted at LREC 2022