Aida Ramezani

Aida Ramezani

Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Data Science Institute (DSI) at the University of Toronto, jointly supervised by Professor Yang Xu (Department of Computer Science) and Professor Jennifer Stellar (Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences). I received my PhD from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

My research examines the interplay between language, morality, and AI. An overview of my work is available here.

Awards

  • DSI Postdoctoral fellowship, 2025
  • Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society Graduate Affiliate, 2022-2025.
  • Cognitive Science Society Disciplinary Diversity & Integration Award, 2024, 2025.
  • Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society Graduate Fellowship, 2021-2022.
  • Iran’s National Elites Foundation: Recognized as elite member, 2016-2020.

Publications

  • Ramezani, A., Stellar, J.E., Feinberg, M., and Xu, Y. Historical reconstruction of human moralization with word association and text corproa. Nature Communications (early access) pdf, code, api.

  • Ramezani, A., and Xu, Y. The discordance between embedded ethics and cultural inference in large language models. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) pdf, code.

  • Zhu, W., Ramezani, A., and Xu, Y. Visual moral inference and communication. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Disciplinary Diversity and Integration Award. pdf, code

  • Ramezani, A., Stellar, J.E., Feinberg, M., and Xu, Y. Evolution of the moral lexicon. Open Mind (2024). pdf, code

  • Ramezani, A., Liu, E., Lee, S., and Xu, Y. Quantifying the emergence of moral foundational lexicon in child language development. PNAS Nexus (2024). pdf, code

  • Ramezani, A., and Xu, Y. Moral association graph: A cognitive model for automated moral inference. Topics in Cognitive Science. Disciplinary Diversity and Integration Award. pdf, code. Shorter version appeared in Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

  • Ramezani, A., and Xu, Y. Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language models. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of 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., and Xu, Y. The emergence of moral foundations in child language development. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. pdf

  • 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

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, University of Toronto, September 2020 – December 2025
  • BSc in Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, September 2016 - July 2020

Work Experience

  • Intern of Technical Staff, Cohere, 2025
  • Research and Development Intern, Microsoft + Nuance communications, 2023