Ali Emami

Honoured to receive the #EMNLP2024 Social Impact Paper Award with collaborators, led by Rob Morabito (at the time of submitting, an undergrad!) When developed carefully, AI *can* be used for the betterment of society, & for learning a thing or two about ourselves along the way!

Beyond India, we lay out the complete pipeline for applying this to any culturally diverse country. Check out our paper: arxiv.org/abs/2601.15550/ Huge shoutout to co-authors Sangmitra Madhusudan, Trush Shashank, Steph Buongiorno, Renata Dividino & @jad_kabbara

Cultural commonsense in India is regional, not national. The LLMs we tested achieve only 13-20% accuracy on region-specific questions. Worse, they consistently over-select answers from Central and Northern India while marginalizing other regions.

"Which decorations are typically used in the celebration of festivals?" In North India, it's lights. In West India, flowers. In Central India..Rangolis! Same question, same country, different answers. LLMs treat Indian culture as monolithic. We built INDICA to test this!

Our paper "FOREST: Frame of Reference Evaluation in Spatial Reasoning Tasks", won a Senior Area Chair Highlights Award at EMNLP-2025! Thanks to the excellent work of my graduate student Tanawan Premsri. #EMNLP2025 #NLProc #EMNLP aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-mai…

If you're at #EMNLP2025, we're presenting “We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof.”. Our presentation is also on Underline, & if you love it, let us know by casting your votes ❤️ 🗓️ Nov 6, 8–9 AM (UTC+8) 📍 Gather Session 3 📰 aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-mai…

We’re hiring! Looking for Interns, Research Assistants, and Postdocs to work on Automated Interpretability--building systems that can analyse, explain, and intervene on large models to make them safe! Work with me @Oxford, or remotely. Apply by Nov 15: forms.gle/bKp8x2eYiFfmpC… I’ll be at #EMNLP this week--if you want to chat about automated interpretability, safety, technical governance etc, come say hi 👋

Full paper (w/ reasoning traces & human comparison): arxiv.org/abs/2510.20543 Huge shoutout to lead author Sangmitra Madhusudan and Kaige Chen (whose brilliance [that the models we tested repeatedly underestimated] powered this entire work).

Interesting nugget for us🍗: Plausibility actually hurts performance when the question requires causal reasoning, not world knowledge (pedagogical moral: shortcuts hinder you on tough questions!) Models confidently hallucinate the likely consequence...not the grammatical one.

🚨 New paper: When do LLMs stop parsing language, and start guessing from semantic "reflexes"? We built CenterBench, a stress test of recursive center-embedded sentences like: “The cat [that the dog chased] meowed.”

It is PhD application season again 🍂 For those looking to do a PhD in AI, these are some useful resources 🤖: 1. Examples of statements of purpose (SOPs) for computer science PhD programs: cs-sop.org [1/4]

As one of the organizers of the @McGill_NLP reading group, I'm happy to announce that we've uploaded our very first talk to YouTube: mcgill-nlp.github.io/reading-group/…

@universeinanegg It didn't manage to stop me from viewing and loving your work, Ari! Keep em coming!

…and we got shadowbanned for a second time. I genuinely cannot believe it.

@mhashemi Taarof mogged is a hilarious way to put it 🤣

Wikipedia says it "promotes equality in a hierarchical culture". But really, if you're like me and you're only trained 2 replies deep, you're going to get taarof mogged every time. You'll be walking out of people's houses with their food and furnishings bc you can't say no.

This is so funny to me. For all the "absolute mode" haters, here's the exact opposite. 🤣

@shaydamoezzi @arkitus So, there's TI (Taarof Intelligent), and then TSI (Taarof Shirazi Intelligence)..

@arkitus it will be fully agi complete when it can master not just taarof but taarofe shirazi

This is AGI complete

@barbarikon @arkitus While I tend to agree, I also think this may be a case of let's be careful what we wish for 😅

@arkitus I think LLMs already do too much taarof. They need to be less polite and more direct.

The most important skill for a researcher is not technical ability. It's taste. The ability to identify interesting and tractable problems, and recognize important ideas when they show up. This can't be taught directly. It's cultivated through curiosity and broad reading.