Isar Nejadgholi

Isar Nejadgholi

Senior Research Scientist National Research Council Canada

I am a Senior Research Scientist at the National Research Council Canada and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Ottawa. In my research, I am interested in applying machine learning models to make positive changes in society. I also work on making sure that AI systems are designed and used responsibly. Previously, I have worked on building and deploying machine learning systems in various applications, including biomedical signal, image, speech and text processing, in both academic and industrial environments. My current work is mainly on natural language processing, and in a few projects, I work on multimodal systems that combine images and text. I serve as a reviewer at ACL conferences and was an area chair at ACL2023 and EMNLP2023. I am also a committee member at Several ACL workshops, including WOAH, TrustNLP and PrivateNLP. Outside work, I practice Persian choir singing with Bahar Choir Group.

Latest News

We will be at ACL 2023 in Toronto and will present the following papers:

  • Svetlana Kiritchenko, Georgina Curto, Isar Nejadgholi, and Kathleen C. Fraser. (2023) Aporophobia: An Overlooked Type of Toxic Language Targeting the Poor. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH).[Paper]

  • Fraser, K.C., Kiritchenko, S., Nejadgholi, I., Kerkhof, A. (2023) What Makes a Good Counter-Stereotype? Evaluating Strategies for Automated Responses to Stereotypical Text. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations (SICon).[paper]

  • Isar Nejadgholi, Svetlana Kiritchenko, Kathleen C. Fraser, and Esma Balkir. (2023) Concept-Based Explanations to Test for False Causal Relationships Learned by Abusive Language Classifiers. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH).[paper]

  • Ghanadian, H., Nejadgholi, I., & Osman, H. A. (2023). ChatGPT for Suicide Risk Assessment on Social Media: Quantitative Evaluation of Model Performance, Potentials and Limitations. 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis (WASSA at ACL 2023).[paper]

Best Short Paper Award

Our paper, Diversity is Not a One-Way Street: Pilot Study on Ethical Interventions for Racial Bias in Text-to-Image Systems., won the best short paper award at the 14th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) in Waterloo. [Paper]