Hi! I’m a 4th year Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. I am in the computational linguistics group and work under the supervision of Professor Yang Xu.

My research focuses on language and morality. In particular, I study

  • how people express their moral values through language
  • how these values might change over time and between different cultures
  • how we can evaluate and develop the current natural language processing (NLP) technology with respect to changes in people’s values.

I take a multidisciplinary approach using insight from moral psychology, cognitive science, and computational social science.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Toronto, September 2020 – Present
  • B.S. in Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, September 2016 - July 2020

Research interests

  • Natural Language Processing
  • Computational Social Science
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Linguistics

Publications

  • Ramezani, A., and Xu, Y. Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language models. In Proceedings of the 61th Annual Meeting the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023. pdf, code.

  • Ramezani, A., Stellar, J.E., Feinberg, M., and Xu, Y. Evolution of moral semantics through metaphorization. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. pdf, code.

  • Ramezani, A., Liu, E., Ferreira Pinto Jr., R., Lee, S., Xu, Y. The emergence of moral foundations in child language development. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. pdf, code.

  • Ramezani, A., Zhu, Z., Rudzicz, F., and Xu, Y. An unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021. pdf, code.

Awards

  • Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society Graduate Affiliate, 2021 - 2023.
  • Iran’s National Elites Foundation: Recognized as elite member, 2016 – 2020.