Malihe Alikhani (She/Her)

I am an Assistant Professor at Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution working on AI policy, the Ethics Chair of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and a member of the Northeastern Ethics Institute.

I develop safe and fair AI systems that enhance communication, decision making, and knowledge sharing across disciplines and populations. My work bridges academia, applied AI research, and public policy, connecting theory, practice, and governance to ensure AI serves society responsibly and effectively.As the lead of the Contextual AI Lab, I focus on building multimodal systems that operate meaningfully within context across language, embodiment, and society to support safer, fairer, and more productive interactions between humans and machines. By integrating insights from cognitive and social sciences with machine learning, our models capture the richness of human interpretation and support collaborative meaning construction.

email: m.alikhani AT northeastern.edu

Selected Recent Publications

Accounting for Sycophancy in Language Model Uncertainty Estimation, Anthony Sicilia, Mert Inan, Malihe Alikhani, the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025.

Evaluating Theory of (an uncertain) Mind: Predicting the Uncertain Beliefs of Others in Conversation Forecasting, Anthony Sicilia and Malihe Alikhani, 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Deal, or no deal (or who knows)? Forecasting Uncertainty in Conversations using Large Language Models, Anthony Sicilia, Hyunwoo Kim, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Malihe Alikhani, Jack Hessel, The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024.

Studying and Mitigating Biases in Sign Language Understanding Models, Katherine Atwell, Danielle Bragg, Malihe Alikhani, The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing, Kayo Yin, Amit Moryossef, Julie Hochgesang, Yoav Goldberg, and Malihe Alikhani, The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2021. Best Theme Paper Award

HumBEL: A Human-in-the-Loop Approach for Evaluating Demographic Factors of Language Models in Human-Machine Conversations, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani, The 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024.

PAC-Bayesian Domain Adaptation Bounds for Multiclass Learners, Anthony Sicilia, Katherine Atwell, Malihe Alikhani, Seong Jae Hwang, The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2022. Best Paper Award