Selected Papers

​
2026

• BASIL: Bayesian Assessment of Sycophancy in LLMs, Katherine Atwell, Pedram Heydari, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani, ACM FAccT 2026.

• Dialogue is the Plan: From Interface to Joint Action in Agentic AI, Mert Inan, Malihe Alikhani, Anthony Sicilia, ACL 2026.  

• How Pragmatics Shape Articulation: A Computational Case Study in STEM ASL Discourse, Saki Imai, et al., LREC 2026.  

• MixDPO: Modeling Preference Strength for Pluralistic Alignment, Saki Imai, et al., arXiv 2026.
  
  2025

• Evaluating Theory of (an uncertain) Mind: Predicting the Uncertain Beliefs of Others, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani, ACL 2025.

• SignAlignLM: Integrating Multimodal Sign Language Processing into LLMs, Mert Inan, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani, ACL 2025.

• Measuring Bias and Agreement in Large Language Model Presupposition Judgments, Katherine Atwell, Mandy Simons, Malihe Alikhani, ACL 2025.

• Accounting for Sycophancy in Language Model Uncertainty Estimation, Anthony Sicilia, Mert Inan, Malihe Alikhani, NAACL 2025.

• How to Align Multiple Signed Language Corpora for Better Sign-to-Sign Translations?, Mert Inan, Yang Zhong, Vidya Ganesh, Malihe Alikhani, NAACL 2025.

• Identifying & Interactively Refining Ambiguous User Goals for Data Visualization, Mert Inan, et al., EMNLP 2025.

• Adaptive Platt Scaling with Causal Interpretations for Self-Reflective LM Uncertainty Estimates, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani, EMNLP 2025.

• SiLVERScore: Semantically-Aware Embeddings for Sign Language Generation Evaluation, Saki Imai, et al., RANLP 2025.

• Measuring How (Not Just Whether) VLMs Build Common Ground, Saki Imai, et al., RANLP 2025.

• How LLMs Influence Perceived Bias in Journalism, Asteria Kaeberlein, Malihe Alikhani, RANLP 2025.

• Reversing Causal Assumptions: Explainability in Online Sports Dialogues, Asteria Kaeberlein, Malihe Alikhani, RANLP 2025.

• Contextual ASR Error Handling with LLMs Augmentation for Goal-Oriented AI, Yuya Asano, et al., COLING 2025.

• An Active Learning Framework for Inclusive Generation by LLMs, Sabit Hassan, Anthony B. Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani, COLING 2025.

• Better Slow than Sorry: Introducing Positive Friction for Reliable Dialogue Systems, Mert Inan, et al., TACL 2025.

• "Nothing about us without us": Perspectives of Global Deaf Communities on Sign Language Technologies, K. Atwell, et al., arXiv 2025.

• Opera: A dataset of observation, persona, rationale, and action for evaluating LLMs, Z. Wang, et al., arXiv 2025.

• Human-centered explanation does not fit all: Sociotechnical, cognitive, and individual factors, Y. Ahn, et al., arXiv 2025. 
  
  2024

• Deal, or no deal (or who knows)? Forecasting Uncertainty in Conversations, Anthony Sicilia, et al., ACL 2024.

• Generating Signed Language Instructions in Large-Scale Dialogue Systems, Mert Inan, et al., NAACL 2024.

• Studying and Mitigating Biases in Sign Language Understanding Models, Katherine Atwell, Danielle Bragg, Malihe Alikhani, EMNLP 2024.

• HumBEL: A Human-in-the-Loop Approach for Evaluating Demographic Factors, Anthony Sicilia, Jennifer Gates, Malihe Alikhani, EACL 2024.

• Combining Discourse Coherence with LLMs for Inclusive, Equitable Dialogue, Katherine Atwell, et al., COLING 2024.

• Seeing Eye-to-Eye: Cross-Modal Coherence Relations Inform Eye-gaze Patterns, Mert Inan, Malihe Alikhani, COLING 2024.

• A corpus of Persian literary text, S. Raji, M. Alikhani, G. de Melo, M. Stone, Journal of LREA.  

• Active Learning for Robust and Representative LLM Generation, Sabit Hassan, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani.
  🏆 Outstanding Paper Award (CustomNLP4U)

• Eliciting Uncertainty in Chain-of-Thought to Mitigate Bias, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani.
  🏆 Outstanding Paper Award (NLP4PI)

• The importance of including signed languages in NLP, K. Yin, et al., Springer Book Chapter. 

• Coherence-driven multimodal safety dialogue with active learning for embodied agents, S. Hassan, et al., arXiv 2024.  

• Fairness at every intersection: Intersectional biases in clinical predictions, R. Ramachandranpillai, et al., arXiv 2024.  

• Dialogue with Robots: Proposals for Broadening Participation, C. Kennington, et al., arXiv 2024.  

• Learning to generate context-sensitive backchannel smiles for embodied AI agents, M. Bilalpur, et al., CEUR Workshop.  

• Evaluating Theory of (an uncertain) Mind in Conversation Forecasting, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani, arXiv 2024. 
  
  2023

• SODA: Million-scale Dialogue Distillation with Social Commonsense (EMNLP 2023), Hyunwoo Kim, et al. 🏆 Best Paper Award

• Learning To Generate Equitable Text in Dialogue from Biased Training Data, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani, ACL 2023.

• MedNgage: A Dataset for Understanding Engagement in Patient-Nurse Conversations, Yan Wang, et al., ACL 2023.   

• D-CALM: A Dynamic Clustering-based Active Learning for Mitigating Bias, Sabit Hassan, Malihe Alikhani, ACL 2023. (Note: exact anthology ID may vary)

• Multilingual Content Moderation: A Case Study on Reddit, Meng Ye, et al., EACL 2023.

• How people talk about each other: Modeling Generalized Intergroup Bias, V. Govindarajan, et al., EACL 2023.

• Learning Multimodal Cues of Children's Uncertainty, Q. Cheng, et al., SIGDIAL 2023.

• Including Facial Expressions in Contextual Embeddings for Sign Language Generation, Carla Viegas, et al., SEM 2023.  

• Image-text coherence and its implications for multimodal AI, Malihe Alikhani, et al., Frontiers in AI.  

• PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically, S. Keh, et al., EACL 2023.  

• DisCGen: A Framework for Discourse-Informed Counterspeech Generation, Sabit Hassan, Malihe Alikhani, IJCNLP-AACL 2023.  
  
  2022

• Modeling Non-Cooperative Dialogue: Theoretical and Empirical Insights, Anthony Sicilia, et al., TACL 2022.

• PAC-Bayesian domain adaptation bounds for multiclass learners, Anthony Sicilia, et al. 🏆 Best Paper Award (UAI 2022).  

• How to Ask for Donations? Learning User-Specific Persuasive Dialogue Policies, Nhat Tran, Malihe Alikhani, Diane Litman. 🏆 Best Student Paper Award (UMAP 2022)

• LEATHER: A Framework for Learning to Generate Human-like Text, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani, AACL 2022. 

• Modeling Intensification for Sign Language Generation, Mert Inan, et al., ACL 2022.

• The Change that Matters in Discourse Parsing: Impact of Domain Shift, Katherine Atwell, et al., ACL 2022.

• Cross-modal coherence for text-to-image retrieval, Malihe Alikhani, et al., AAAI 2022.

• Retrieve, caption, generate: Visual grounding for enhancing commonsense, Steven Y. Feng, et al., AAAI 2022.  

• Nareor: The narrative reordering problem, Varun Gangal, et al., AAAI 2022.  

• Zero-shot Cross-Linguistic Learning of Event Semantics, Malihe Alikhani, et al., INLG 2022. 

• Political Ideology and Polarization: A Multi-dimensional Approach, Barea Sinno, et al., NAACL 2022.

• APPDIA: A Style Transfer Model for Offensive Social Media Conversations, Katherine Atwell, et al., COLING 2022.

• Getting to YES: The Evolution of the UPMC Youth Enjoy Science Academy, J. Ayoob, et al., Journal of STEM Outreach.  
  
  2021

• Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing (ACL 2021), Kayo Yin, et al.
  🏆 Best Theme Paper Award

• Signed Coreference Resolution, Kayo Yin, Kenneth DeHaan, Malihe Alikhani, EMNLP 2021.

• COSMic: A Coherence-Aware Generation Metric for Image Descriptions, Mert Inan, et al., EMNLP 2021.

• PARSINLU: A Suite of Language Understanding Challenges for Persian, Daniel Khashabi, et al., TACL 2021.

• Examining Covert Gender Bias: Turkish and English MT Models, Chloe Ciora, et al. 
  🏆 Best Short Paper Award (INLG 2021)

• Towards designing enthusiastic AI agents, Carla Viegas, Malihe Alikhani. 
  🏆 Honorable Mention (IVA 2021)

• Entheos: A Multimodal Dataset for Studying Enthusiasm, Carla Viegas, Malihe Alikhani, ACL 2021.

• Abg-CoQA: Clarifying ambiguity in conversational question answering, Meiqi Guo, et al., AKBC 2021.  

• Where Are We in Discourse Relation Recognition?, Katherine Atwell, Junyi Jessy Li, Malihe Alikhani, SIGDIAL 2021.

• AI2D-RST: a multimodal corpus of 1000 primary school science diagrams, T. Hiippala, et al., Journal of LRE. 
  
  2020 & Earlier

• Cross-modal Coherence Modeling for Caption Generation, M. Alikhani, et al., ACL 2020.

• Combining Cognitive Modeling and Reinforcement Learning for Clarification, B. Khalid, et al., COLING 2020.

• Aspectuality Across Genre: A Distributional Semantics Approach, T. Kober, et al., COLING 2020.

• CITE: A Corpus of Image-Text Discourse Relations, M. Alikhani, et al., NAACL 2019.

• Arrows are the Verbs of Diagrams, M. Alikhani, M. Stone, COLING 2018.

• Exploring Coherence in Visual Explanations, M. Alikhani, M. Stone, Multimedia Pragmatics Workshop 2018.  

• When is Likely Unlikely: Variability of Vagueness, K. Persaud, et al., CogSci 2017.  

• Pricing complexity options, M. Alikhani, B. Kjos-Hanssen, Algorithmic Finance 2015.