Lecture Video and Recap: Malihe Alikhani on 'Towards Inclusive and Equitable Language Technologies'

Malihe Alikhani, Assistant Professor of AI and Social Justice, Northeastern University

Lecture Video

Lecture Recap

Colloquium held February 8, 2024.

With the increasing deployment of language technologies to users, the need for a deeper understanding of the impact of natural language processing models on our society and user behaviors has grown. Designing culturally responsible, equitable and inclusive language technologies that can benefit a diverse population is ever more important. Toward this goal, Malihe Alikhani presents two directions: 1) discourse-aware models for more inclusive social media moderation methods, and 2) equitable machine learning frameworks for multimodal communication. Finally, she describes her research vision: building inclusive and collaborative communicative systems by leveraging the cognitive science of language use alongside formal machine learning methods.

About Malihe Alikhani

Malihe Alikhani is an assistant professor of AI and social justice at the Khoury School of Computer Science, Northeastern University. She is affiliated with the Northeastern Ethics Institute as well of the Institute for Experiential AI. Her research interests center on using representations of communicative structure, machine learning and cognitive science to design equitable and inclusive NLP systems for critical applications such as education, health and social justice. Her work has received multiple best paper awards at ACL 2021, UAI2022, INLG2021, UMAP2022 and EMNLP 2023  and has been supported by DARPA, NIH, CDC, Google and Amazon.