About

I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at Cardiff University. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies (TeIAS). I also hold an Affiliated Lecturer position at the University of Cambridge.

My primary research interest lies in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) where I have worked on different problems in lexical semantics, such as semantic representation and similarity, sense representation, word sense disambiguation, and ontology construction and alignment.

[google scholar] [twitter]

Background

Iran University of Science and Technology

I was an Assistant Professor at the Computer Engineering department of IUST (2018-2020). During this time, I taught multiple graduate and undergraduate courses (AI, Deep Learning, NLP, and Advanced Programming) and supervised several graduate students.

University of Cambridge

I was a Research Associate at the Language Technology Lab of the University of Cambridge (2015-2018). During this, I worked on PheneBank (PI: Dr. Nigel Collier), a project at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Biomedical sciences, funded by the UK's Medical Research Council.

Sapienza University

I did my PhD at the Linguistic Computing Laboratory of the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. My PhD advisor was Dr. Roberto Navigli with whom I did research in lexical semantics with a specific focus on the unified semantic representation of different linguistic items.

News

Contact me if you are interested in attending undergraduate or graduate NLP study groups.
June 2024: I will be a Program Co-Chair of ACL 2025!
Feb 2024: To present Phate (a hatred detection dataset for Farsi) at AAAI 2024.
Sep 2023: To serve as Area Chair for LREC-COLING 2024 and EMNLP 2024, Senior Action Editor for ACL 2024 (ARR), and SPC for ECAI 2024.
Sep 2023: Started as a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff NLP.
Aug 2023: Received the 2023 AIJ Prominent Paper Award for our Artificial Intelligence jouirnal article from 2016.
May 2023: Serving as a Senior Area Chair of Sentiment Analysis in EMNLP 2023, an Area Chair of Lexical Semantics for ACL 2023; and Meta-reviewer (SPC) for ECAI 2023.
April 2023: Gave a fresh talk on DecompX at the University of Mannheim.
March 2023: DecompX was accepted at ACL 2023: by far the most accurate (faithful) technique for estimating saliency maps (token attributions).
Jan 2023: Paper on dataset bias mitigation accepted at EACL 2023.
Jan 2023: *SEM 2023 received more than 100 submissions, twice that of its last iteration!
Jan 2023: Became a Member of the Editorial Board, JNLE!

Nov 2022: I will be the General Chair of *SEM 2023 (co-located with ACL 2023)!
Oct 2022: Two papers on efficiency and dataset bias were accepted at EMNLP 2022.
Oct 2022: Received an award for Outstanding Research at the University of Khatam.
Oct 2022: Training data is out for the SemEval-2023 Task on Visual WSD.
August 2022: To give a talk on Isotropy of Contextualised Spaces at IPM ASOC 2022.
July 2022: Gave a talk on Prompting in NLP at the AI Summer School, University of Tehran.
June 2022: Congratulations to Dr. Conforti for successfully defending her PhD at Cambridge.
April 2022: Long paper accepted at NAACL 2022: a new token attribution method (called GlobEnc) with significant boost over existing techniques; plus a demo paper on DadmaTools, a new NLP toolkit for Farsi.
April 2022: Talk on isotropy of contextualised spaces at the University of Sheffield (remote).
March 2022: AdapLeR is out, up to 22x infrence speedup while retaining performance (ACL 2022).
Feb 2022: Five papers acccepted in ACL 2022! 3 in the main conference, 2 in the Findings (almost all with my Master's students). Details soon.
Jan 2022: To serve as a member of Steering Committee for SemEval-2022, Senior AC for NAACL-2022, Senior PC for AAAI-2022 and IJCAI-ECAI-2022, and PC for *ACL-2022 tutorials.
Jan 2022: Contact me if you'd like to audit the graduate NLP course (in Farsi).
Dec 2021: Gave a talk on isotropy of contextualised spaces to London Meta Research (remote).
Dec 2021: I will be the Program Co-Chair of *SEM-2022, with Ellie Pavlick (Brown University).
Oct 2021: Our work on the PheneBank project was accepted for publication at Bioinformatics.
Sep 2021: The Word-in-Context dataset has a dedicated subsection in the 3rd edition of Jurafsky&Martin Speech and Language Processing textbook!
Sep 2021: EMNLP-2021 papers: Token-level probing of BERT (main), A critical investigation of dataset bias mitigation techniques (Findings), Isotropy of fine-tuned spaces (Findings), A cross-model comparison of BERToid models (BlackboxNLP).
Aug 2021: To give a talk on "Prompting in NLP" in ASOC 2021.
Aug 2021: Gave a joint talk, with Amir Hesam Salavati (CTO of Achareh and Ubaar), on Data Science.
Aug 2021: Teaching a 5-day course at ESSLLI 2021 on Embeddings in NLP, with Jose.
May 2021: My student's work on isotropy enhancement was accepted as a short paper at ACL 2021.
May 2021: ParsFEVER (a new dataset for Farsi fact verification) was accepted to be presented *SEM 2021.
Apr 2021: Check out my students' work on token-level analysis of BERT.
Mar 2021: Our comprehensive analysis article (on language models and lexical ambiguity) to appear on Computational Linguistics!
Feb 2021: Teaching NLP (for the first time!) this semester.
Feb 2021: New collaborations with the Economics Faculty (UoC), to appear in WASSA-2021 and Hackashop-2021.
Jan 2021: WiC-TSV (target sense verificatoin) was accepted at EACL-2021. The benchmark provides a novel way of evaluating lexical ambiguity for constrained domains.
Nov 2020: Teaching Deep Learning (graduate course) at TeIAS, co-teaching AI course at IUST with Sauleh Eetemadi.
Sep 2020: Check out our comprehensive overview and analysis of Language Models and Word Sense Disambiguation.
Sep 2020: XL-WiC to appear at EMNLP 2020.
Aug 2020: to give a talk on "Embeddings in NLP" at IPM ASOC 2020, Aug 22-26.
July 2020: To serve as a member of Steering Committee for SemEval-2021, Senior AC for ACL-2021, Senior PC for AAAI-2021 and IJCAI-2021, and AC for NAACL-2021 and *SEM2020.
June 2020: Results are out for SemEval-2020 Task 3, a task for fine-grained measurement of contextual word similarity.
May 2020: Happy to be moving to TeIAS, a new research institute in Tehran, that would allow me to stay more focused on my research. Very grateful to colleagues and friends at IUST for being so helpful and welcoming in the past two years.
April 2020: We will soon release a large-scale dataset for Stance Detection in the Economics domain (paper accepted at ACL 2020).
Mar 2020: Lecture videos will be uploaded for Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning during this term.
Feb 2020: Co-organizing a TeIAS winter school on Data Science, more details.
Dec 2019: Gave a talk on Contextualised Embeddings at the AI Symposium, Amir Kabir University of Technology.
Nov 2019: Coling 2020 tutorial schedule is out. Our tutorial will be on September 14th, morning.
Oct 2019: ESSLLI course confirmed; 10-14 August 2020.
Aug 2019: Milan's comprehensive article on geoparsing evaluation was accepted to LREV.
Aug 2019: Co-organizing a TeIAS summer school on Data Science and Machine Learning, more details.
July 2019: Course material and student projects for Deep Learning course are available at DL972 website.
May 2019: SemEval-2020 Task proposal accepted: Graded Word Similarity in Context (GWSC).
Apr 2019: A new version of WiC dataset is released.
Apr 2019: Co-organizing a shared task on sense distinction in the SemDeep workshop at IJCAI 2019.
Mar 2019: Three papers accepted at NAACL 2019. Cannot attend the conference due to travel ban though!
Feb 2019: Happy to have been selected as the best professor in the AI and Software groups according to the end-of-term student evaluation (department of Computer Engineering, IUST).
Jan 2019: Teaching three courses this semester: Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Programming (in Java), and Deep Learning (graduate). More info here.
Jan 2019: A beta-version of PheneBank demo is online; feedbacks are welcome!
Dec 2018: Serving as an area chair for ACL 2019.
Nov 2018: Paper on unseen word representation accepted to AAAI 2019. Congrats to Victor, my PhD student.
Sep 2018: Code and resources for Card-660 and MS-LSTM (EMNLP 2018).
Sep 2018: Check our challenging benchmark for context-sensitive or sense embeddings: WiC (the Word-in-Context dataset).
Aug 2018: Our survey on sense representation was accepted for publication at the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).
Aug 2018: 3 long papers accepted at EMNLP 2018! Also, 2 papers at BlackboxNLP'18 and RDSM'18 workshops.
► I was offered lectureship positions from some of the best universities in the UK, including Exeter and Southampton (second best ECs department in the UK), all turned down! Going back home!!
May 2018: Our survey on sense representation is finally out!
April 2018: Congratulations to Milan, a PhD student of mine, for having his second consecutive long ACL paper (ACL 2018, Melbourne).
Feb 2018: Teaching a class on multilingual NLP at DTAL (University of Cambridge).
Dec 2017: My two cents on why I think the Stanford Rare Word Similarity dataset is NOT a reliable evaluation benchmark.
Oct 2017: Advising two new Cambridge PhD students: Victor Prokhorov and Costanza Conforti.
Sep 2017: Attending Google NLP Summit in Google Zurich.
June 2017: Our paper on metonymy resolution was selected as an outstanding paper at ACL 2017!
May 2017: Gave a talk on "Semantic Representation of Word Senses" in the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham.
May 2017: Gave a "PhD Training" seminar to DTAL PhD students, with Elaine Schmidt.
April 2017: Two long papers accepted at ACL 2017 (Vancouver): (1) integration of senses into downstream NLP applications, and (2) context pruning for metonymy detection.
March 2017: Our EACL 2017 tutorial's slides are online: Word Vector Space Specialisation.
March 2017: Article accepted at the Language Resources and Evaluation (LREV) journal: What's missing in geographical parsing?
Feb 2017: SemEval-2017 Task 2 results are out.
Jan 2017: EACL short paper on inducing embeddings for rare and unseen words accepted.
Jan 2017: To co-instruct an EACL 2017 tutorial (with Nikola and Ivan) on Word Vector Space Specialisation, April 3, Valencia
Nov 2016: Workshop proposal accepted: SENSE 2017: First Workshop on Sense, Concept and Entity Representations and their Applications at EACL 2017.
Oct 2016: Supervising two student groups on the Computational Linguistics (Li18) course.
July 2016: Long paper on de-conflating word embeddings into sense embeddings accepted at EMNLP 2016 (Austin, TX)!
July 2016: Slides ready for the ACL 2016 tutorial on Semantic Representation of Senses and Concepts!
July 2016: Journal article on the semantic representation of concepts and named entities accepted for publication at AI journal!
May 2016: BabelNet featured in the Time magazine: "Redefining the modern dictionary"!
May 2016: Long paper accepted at ACL 2016 (Berlin)!
One of my former students, José Camacho-Collados, received the Google Fellowship in Natural Language Processing!
To present a tutorial on Semantic Representation of Word Senses and Concepts at ACL 2016 in Berlin.
Feb. 2016: Teaching a class in the Computational Linguistics Seminar course in at Cambridge University.
Feb. 2016: Giving a talk at the CL Cluster in the Computer Laboratory.
Co-organizing a SemEval task on Taxonomy Enrichment with David Jurgens.
Nov. 2015: Moved to Cambridge to work as a research associate.
Sep. 2015: Attending the Google NLP PhD Summit in Zurich.
Sep. 2015: Presenting a tutorial titled Semantic Similarity Frontiers: From Concepts to Documents at EMNLP 2015 in Lisbon.
Aug. 2015: Won the best PhD paper award 2015 at the Department of Computer Science, Sapienza University.
June 2015: Invited talk at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA): "Computational Semantic Representation".
Dec. 2014: PhD thesis selected as the best PhD thesis in the Department of Computer Science in the academic semester with the "Ottimo" title, based on the reviews of Prof. Rada Mihalcea and Prof. Peter Turney.
Aug. 2014: Co-organizing a SemEval task on Cross-Level Semantic Similarity in Dublin.
July 2014: Won the 2014 Research Grant "Sapienza Starting Grant" (Italian: “Avvio alla Ricerca”) for the research project: “Transforming Wiktionary into a high-coverage full-fledged Multilingual Semantic Network” offered by Sapienza University of Rome.
Aug. 2013: Paper nominated for the best long paper award at ACL.

Publications

[Not updated anymore; please check my Google Scholar profile for more recent publications.]

D. Loureiro, K. Rezaee, M. T. Pilehvar, J. Camacho-Collados
Language Models for Word Sense Disambiguation.
Computational Linguistics 2021.

PDF

A. Breit, A. Revenko, K. Rezaee, M. T. Pilehvar, J. Camacho-Collados
WiC-TSV: An Evaluation Benchmark for Target Sense Verification of Words in Context
EACL 2021.

PDF
Data

C. Conforti, J. Berndt, M. T. Pilehvar, C. Giannitsarou, F. Toxvaerd, and N. Collier
STANDER: An Expert-Annotated Dataset for News Stance Detection and Evidence Retrieval.
Findings of EMNLP 2020.

A. Raganato, T. Pasini, J. Camacho-Collados, and M.T. Pilehvar
XL-WiC: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Semantic Contextualization.
EMNLP 2020.

C. Conforti, J. Berndt, M. T. Pilehvar, C. Giannitsarou, F. Toxvaerd, and N. Collier
Will-They-Won't-They: A Very Large Dataset for Stance Detection on Twitter.
ACL 2020.

M Gritta, MT Pilehvar, and N Collier
A pragmatic guide to geoparsing evaluation.
Language Resources and Evaluation, 2020.

V. Prokhorov, M. T. Pilehvar, D. Kartsaklis, P. Lio, and N. Collier
Unseen Word Representation by Aligning Heterogeneous Lexical Semantic Spaces.
AAAI 2019, Hawaii, USA.

M. T. Pilehvar and J. Camacho-Collados
WiC: the Word-in-Context Dataset for Evaluating Context-Sensitive Meaning Representations.
NAACL 2019, Minneapolis, USA.

M. T. Pilehvar
On the Importance of Distinguishing Word Meaning Representations: A Case Study on Reverse Dictionary Mapping.
NAACL 2019, Minneapolis, USA.

V. Prokhorov, M. T. Pilehvar, and N. Collier
Generating Knowledge Graph Paths from Textual Definitions using Sequence-to-Sequence Models.
NAACL 2019, Minneapolis, USA.

PDF
BIBTex

Teachings

Artificial Intelligence (undergraduate)

I have taught this course several times at IUST: [spring 97][fall 97][fall 98][spring 99][fall 99]

Deep Learning (graduate)

My deep learning courses are mostly applied, with special focus on working with deep learning frameworks, such as Keras, Tensorflow, and Pytorch. [fall 97][fall 98][fall 99]

Deep Learning (undergraduate)

I usually dedicate the last few weeks of the undergraduate AI course to teaching basics of deep learning. However, due to high interest, I once tried having a full undergraduate course on deep learning in [spring 98].

Natural Language Processing (graduate)

I'm currently teaching a graduate course on the topic (for the first time). Please feel free to join!

Advanced Programming (undergraduate)

My Java programming course in [fall 97].

Other

I enjoy stargazing laying flat on my back outside under the clear skies of my hometown (Hamedan). Many years ago, when I was younger, I used to do some astrophotography. I used to send my photos to Spaceweather.com. I think this is my last photo published on Spaceweather. I once had a photo published in Astronomy Magazine (the largest U.S. magazine on the subject).

Past Students

Jose Camacho-Collados (PhD advisor 2015-2018, Sapienza), now Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University.
Ignacio Iacobacci (PhD advisor 2015-2018, Sapienza), now Senior NLP Researcher and Team Leader at Huawei, London.
Milan Gritta (PhD advisor 2016-2019, Cambridge), now Senior NLP Researcher at Huawei, London.
Victor Prokhorov (PhD advisor 2017-2018, Cambridge), now postdoc at Edinburgh University.
Costanza Conforti (PhD advisor 2018-2022, Cambridge), now Research Engineer at Google, Zurich.
Kiamehr Rezaee (MSc supervisor 2019-2021, IUST), now PhD student at Cardiff University.
Hosein Mohebbi (MSc supervisor 2020-2021, IUST), now PhD student at Tilburg University.
Houman Mehrafarin (MSc supervisor 2021-2022, IUST), now PhD student at the University of Edinburgh.
Sara Rajaee (MSc supervisor 2021-2022, IUST), now PhD student at the University of Amsterdam.
Ali Modarressi (MSc supervisor 2020-2022, IUST), now PhD student at LMU Munich (Hinrich Schütze).

Contact

mp792@cam.ac.uk

LinkedIn

Room 5.70
Abacws Building
Cardiff University
Cardiff
United Kingdom