Language, Meaning, and AI Systems
Exploring how meaning is represented across human language and artificial intelligence.
Linguist, AI Researcher, and Interdisciplinary Scholar
I study language, artificial intelligence, culture, and meaning.
My work spans linguistic theory, multilingual and low-resource NLP, culturally responsive AI, narrative analysis, AI evaluation, and educational technology. I’m particularly interested in questions that require crossing disciplinary boundaries, challenging assumptions, and examining what happens at the margins: languages, cultures, communities, and forms of knowledge that mainstream technology often overlooks.
My intellectual foundation is linguistics, but my work moves between theory and computation, research and application, language and society. I’m interested not only in how AI systems process language, but in what they represent, what they miss, and what those failures reveal about both technology and language.
Through the Zoorna Institute for Language, AI and Society, I lead research and educational initiatives in multilingual AI, low-resource languages, cultural understanding, and broader access to AI.
Featured
Workshop CFP
SilkRoadNLP 2027
The next SilkRoadNLP workshop brings together researchers working on NLP and language models for the Iranian language family. This year's theme ‘From Representation to Sovereignty’ explores how language communities can shape AI development and govern the use of their linguistic and cultural data.
Research in Progress
Mitra: A Multilingual AI Learning Companion
Our team at Zoorna Institute is developing Mitra to support language learning through reading, vocabulary, and guided interaction, bringing linguistic research into the design of AI-assisted learning. Let us know if you'd like to pilot it in your classroom.
Selected Talks & Publications
Predicate Composition and Complex Predicates: Collected Papers
Book
October 2026
A Collection of Previously Published and Circulated Articles
This volume brings together six earlier studies on Persian complex predicates, Eastern Armenian causatives, and cross-linguistic patterns of predicate composition in one place. The papers examine how verbal and nonverbal components contribute to argument structure, causation, and telicity, alongside questions about preverbal nominals and parallels between nominal and verbal projections. This volume collects five previously published papers and one previously circulated, unpublished manuscript; it presents their original analyses without incorporating subsequent scholarship or my more recent theoretical developments. [book information]
AI is Deciding Our Lives. Are Women Deciding AI?
Invited Talk
March 2026
Invited talk, FEMINNO Armenia CSW70 Parallel Event, part of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women
A global virtual event contributing to the development of a Feminist AI Manifesto. The talk focused on the role of data, representation, and language in shaping AI systems, and the risks of exclusion for women and low-resource language communities.
Linguistic Data-Driven Approach to Persian Language Pedagogy: Practical Application to Compound Verbs
Book Chapter
November 2025
In Persian Language Pedagogy: New Trends and Innovations. Routledge.
This chapter introduces a collaborative program of practice, which advocates for the integration of linguistic theory, formal language acquisition research, and Artificial Intelligence-driven approaches within the Persian language teaching curriculum. [book information]
We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
Publication
September 2025
Empirical Methods in NLP (EMNLP). Suzhou, China.
Large language models (LLMs) struggle to navigate culturally specific communication norms, such as the Persian taarof, a social norm in Iranian interactions, limiting their effectiveness in global contexts. [read paper]
AI-enabled narrative analytics for Persian and Kurdish.
Conference Presentation
May 2025
4th North American Conference on Iranian Linguistics (NACIL4), University of Toronto Mississauga.
Presented novel methods for extracting narrative structures from multilingual texts, showcasing advances in NLP for Persian and Kurdish low-resource languages. [learn more]
My journey in AI: A perspective on the role of women in Artificial Intelligence.
Invited Talk
March 2025.
Women's History Month program, Miami-Dade College.
My personal journey through computational linguistics and AI research, highlighting the obstacles women face in the field, from microaggressions to systemic pressures that push many to leave, and inspiring new pathways for women to lead and thrive in AI.
For collaboration, research inquiries, or speaking engagements, please contact me.