Hi! I’m Aida. I’m a third-year Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Toronto supervised by Professor Yang Xu. In my research, I explore how people express their values through language, how these values evolve over time and vary among communities, and how we can develop computational methods for studying human language and identifying these evolutions. I take a multidisciplinary approach in my research and combine tools from different research areas, including natural language processing, computational social science, cognitive science, and psychology. When I’m not doing research, I’d like to learn about history, explore literature, draw, and go swimming.
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., 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
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
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
Awards
- Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society Graduate Affiliate, 2021 - 2023.
- Iran’s National Elites Foundation: Recognized as elite member, 2016 – 2020.