[About]
[Latest update: Apr, 2026]
Hi! My name is Arash Ashrafzadeh, and I'm an AI researcher and engineer. I'm open to NLP researcher and AI engineering roles in industry and academia. Ideally, I would like to study small models of real-time dialogue understanding, meaning that my interests are at the intersection of:
- Neuro-Symbolic AI → building cognitively-plausible (data efficient, generalisable and incremental) models of language
- Interpretability for incremental processing → understanding how incremental language processing works in language models
- Edge AI → optimising model deployment and on-device online learning and efficient inference with smol/quantised models
- Voice AI → benchmarking end-to-end vs modular approaches for robust real-time conversational AI
If you are interested in collaborating with me, please feel free to contact me by email on incrementaliser AT gmail.com.
[Education]
I recently finished my PhD in NLP at Heriot-Watt university. I was supervised by Dr. Arash Eshghi and Dr. Julian Hough. Before this, I received my BSc in Computer Science from Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic).
Broadly speaking, my research topic has been Computational Linguistics for Conversational AI, and more specifically, I have been working on Incremental Grounded Language Learning. In particular, I have been interested in Incremental Semantic Parsing and Incremental NLG from Symbolic Semantic Representations. If you are curious to know more, I have made a poster for it here.
[Publications]
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BabyDS: Visually Grounded Grammar Induction with Online Curriculum Learning
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Learning to generate and corr- uh I mean repair language in real-time
[Projects]
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Embedding Room
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Incremental Semantic Parsing (PhD research)
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Persian Question Answering system using TF-IDF
[Blog Posts]
[News]
- Aug 2024I attended UKIS 2024 in Cambridge and presented a poster on our ongoing research. [abstract] [poster]
- Mar 2024I supervised a group of 8 undergrads for their Conversational Agents course project. They built a chatbot that could handle interruptions and ask clarification questions!
- Jan 2024I am an enhanced TA for the Conversational Agents (F20CA) and Data Structures & Algorithms (F28DA) courses at Heriot-Watt this semester.
- Sep 2023I am an enhanced TA for the Artificial Intelligence (F29AI) and Bio-Inspired Computation (F20BC) courses at Heriot-Watt this semester.
- Aug 2023Our paper "Learning to generate and corr- uh I mean repair language in real-time" was accepted at SemDial 2023 (MariLogue).
- Sep 2022I am TAing Artificial Intelligence (F29AI) and Praxis (F27PX) courses at Heriot-Watt.
- Sep 2022I volunteered as a local chair for organising SIGdial 2022 at Heriot-Watt. Here is the link to proceedings.
- Sep 2022I presented my PhD topic for the second year at the Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (YRRSDS) 2022. [position paper] [poster]
- Aug 2022I was at the European Summer School for Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) 2022 in Galway, Ireland, took some amazing courses and met lots of amazing people!
- May 2022Me and my supervisor gave two short lectures on the computational work around Dynamic Syntax at Brazilian Linguistics Association (Abralin) 2022 online.
- Jan 2022I took part in the Advanced Language Processing Winter School (ALPS) 2022 presented a poster on my PhD topic, enjoyed the great lectures and met lots of amazing people!
- July 2021I presented my PhD topic in my first year at Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (YRRSDS) 2021. [position paper] [poster]
- Dec 2019Gave a short talk on "Applications of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)". [slides]
- Oct 2019Wrote my first Medium blog post on "Cholesky Decomposition for Hilbert Matrix". [link]
