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m.alikhani AT northeastern DOT edu
I am not accepting students for the 2025-2026 academic year.

Malihe Alikhani (She/Her)

 

I am an Assistant Professor of AI and Social Justice at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and a member of the Northeastern Ethics Institute.

 

I work towards studying and addressing biases in learning models, especially in applications such as education, health, and social justice.  This aspiration has led me to collaborate with educators, healthcare experts, and community leaders to create inclusive technology-enabled experiences.​

 

My research aims to design inclusive and equitable language technologies that communicate effectively across diverse populations, with a particular focus on underserved communities. By integrating insights from cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, policy, and social sciences with machine learning techniques, I develop computational models that capture the rich diversity of human interpretation and enhance the effectiveness of language as a communicative tool.

​Selected Publications

Evaluating Theory of (an uncertain) Mind: Predicting the Uncertain Beliefs of Others in Conversation Forecasting, Anthony Sicilia and Malihe Alikhani.

 

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.

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

Current Projects

Harm Measurement for Inclusive Language Technologies 

 

AI-assisted social media moderation and mediation; harm measurement and ethics of social interactions with AI; oppressive practices & norms; pragmatics of harmful speech.

Equitable, Robust, and Trustworthy Language Technologies

 

Studying the generalization and robustness of NLP models using the tools of learning theory; designing theoretical machine learning frameworks for language generation and dialogue management; reducing overreliance and sycophancy.

Consulting

Collaborative Conversational AI for Education and Health
 

Modeling collaboration as shared meaning construction; supporting patient and health professionals' interactions with robust conventional AI systems; sign language understanding and generation.

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