Hi there!
I’m a final-year PhD candidate at the Department of CSAI at Tilburg University. I’m part of the consortium project InDeep: Interpreting Deep Learning Models for Text and Sound, and happy to be supervised by Afra Alishahi, Willem Zuidema, and Grzegorz Chrupała.
Research
My research focuses on analyzing and interpreting deep neural models of language (written or spoken) by treating them as mathematical functions. I try to develop analysis methods that can faithfully elucidate the interplay and flow of information within neural networks.
Background
I was a visiting researcher (Jan-Mar 2024) at ILCC, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, worked with Ivan Titov.
I completed my Master’s (2019-2021) in Artificial Intelligence at Iran University of Science and Technology, where my research revolved around the interpretation of pre-trained language models and the utilization of interpretability techniques to accelerate their inference time, under the supervision of Mohammad Taher Pilehvar.
Before that, I got my Bachelor’s (2014-2019) in Computer Engineering from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. During that, I was working under the supervision of Ahad Harati as a team member of the Nexus RoboCup Simulation Team.
Services
- I co-organize:
- BlackboxNLP Workshop (2023, 2024, 2025)
- InDeep Journal Club (since 2022)
- I co-offered a tutorial on interpretability at EACL 2024 conference
- I reviewed for the following CL conferences: EMNLP (2022, 2023), ACL 2023, EACL 2023, ACL Rolling Review (since 2022)
News
- Dec 2024: 📺 A series of short videos on Transformer Interpretability available on YouTube!
- Oct 2024: Check out our new preprint: Disentangling Textual and Acoustic Features of Neural Speech Representations
- Mar 2024: Materials (slides, notebooks, etc.) for EACL 2024 tutorial on “Transformer-specific Interpretability” are available here.
- Dec 2023: 🏅 Got an Outstanding Paper Award for Homophone Disambiguation Reveals Patterns of Context Mixing in Speech Transformers at EMNLP 2023!
- Mar 2023: Blog Post: A few thoughts on why Value Zeroing.