Malihe Alikhani (She/Her)
I am an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Science and a member of the Northeastern Ethics Institute. I serve as the Ethics Chair of ACL Rolling Review, have advised Congress on AI policy, and am currently a Visiting Fellow at The Center on Regulation and Markets at Brookings.
I work towards developing safe and fair AI systems that enhance communication, decision-making, and knowledge-sharing across disciplines and populations. My work spans academia, public policy, and applied AI research, bridging the gap between theory, practice, and governance to ensure that AI serves society effectively and responsibly.
By integrating insights from cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and social sciences with machine learning, I develop models that capture the richness of human interpretation and collaborative meaning construction.
My recent projects include AI systems that moderate and mediate discussions on social media, mitigate the impact of misinformation, and introduce healthy friction to facilitate common ground. I've also developed multimodal systems that adapt STEM education to personalize learning for students with a range of communication skills and AI-driven tools that support decision-making and patient communication in healthcare.
Email: m.alikhani AT northeastern DOT edu
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