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

    Our book on Embeddings in NLP is finally out! Check here for prints and ebooks (more info). An early draft of the book can be obtained from here.

  • 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!

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.

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.

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.

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

Room 5.70
Abacws Building
Cardiff University
Cardiff
United Kingdom