Welcome to my personal page!

I’m a PhD student in Cognitive Science at Carleton University, Canada. My background is in Computational Linguistics with a focus on Computational Semantics. I spend a lot of time wondering if machines will ever actually “get” what humans mean. Spoiler alert: they don’t! Transformers (the LLMs everyone’s hyped about) are great at spitting out patterns, but genuine understanding? Not so much.

My PhD research takes on the Proviso Problem, a classic puzzle in formal semantics, by looking at how humans and language models process presuppositions in complex sentences. Put simply, I study the hidden assumptions we sneak into our words and explore how machines struggle (sometimes hilariously) to keep up.

This is a classic example of how understanding presuppositions becomes tricky in complex sentence structures such as conditionals.

Semantics is tricky because humans don’t always say what they mean: we lie, we joke, we hint, we presuppose. If even people trip over meaning, can machines ever truly get it? I’m exploring one small piece of that big question by focusing on presuppositions in conditionals.

All the Other Things I’ve Done and Am Interested In

I hold an MSc in Computational Linguistics from Sharif University of Technology, Iran. My thesis focused on authorship attribution and writing style detection. Later, I collaborated on a project to create the first gold-standard dataset of Persian Abstract Meaning Representation . That project made me even more interested in semantics and its potential to make meaning more machine-readable by building graphs of meaning based on syntactic and semantic rules.

In 2018, I began my second master’s in Computer Science at Istanbul Technical University in Türkiye, which I pursued until 2020. Although the degree remained unfinished due to my immigration to Canada and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I completed all the coursework for the program. During that time, I also authored an ACL publication on Turkish Abstract Meaning Representation .

Apart from my main research, I carry a deep personal passion for language technology for less-resourced languages. I grew up in western Iran as part of the Southern Kurdish community. Southern Kurdish is a branch of Kurdish language spoken by many, yet almost invisible in the world of technology. Realizing how many speakers of minority languages face barriers to technology simply because of language has made me believe that the computational linguistics community must do more to address the gap. I have been, and will continue to be, active in this area because for me it’s not just about technology, it’s about equity, identity, and making sure every language has a voice.

For more on all the projects described above, check out my publications page.