Ash (Afshin) Rahimi

My research interests fall within the fields of Natural Language Processing, Social Network Analysis and Machine Learning. I am specifically interested in exploiting both structured and unstructured data to help machines understand conversational language in Emergency Situations and Health Informatics.

News

  • After three good years at UQ, I'm joining Amazon to work on exciting user-facing projects.
  • Class-imbalance and fairness are often studied separately, our new paper, "Fairness-aware Class Imbalanced Learning" (EMNLP2021) tries to bridge the gap. Paper, Slides and Code.
  • Two papers accepted to COLING2020, one on aligning Wikipedia and UMLS, and another on Indonesian pretrained models and benchmarks (see my GScholar).
  • Paper with Gaurav Arora in ALTA2019 on catastrophic forgetting in NLP applications.
  • I joined The University of Queensland as a lecturer (Assisstant Professor). If you're interested in working with me on NLP/Social Media/Health, please email me.
  • There are more than 6000 languages without any annotation, our new ACL-19 paper on transfer learning (few shot and zero shot NER) for those languages+ slides .
  • Geotagged data is scarce, our new ACL-18 paper on semi-supervised user geolocation using graph convolutional networks + slides .
  • I defended my PhD, and submitted my thesis. The slides are available here.
  • Our EMNLP2017 paper on using Mixture Density Networks for geolocation and RBF networks for lexical dialectology is published. The code and slides are available.
  • Our ACL 2017 paper on geolocation (predict location given text) and lexical dialectology (predict text given location) where we talk about utilising both network and text information for geolocation and also use the geolocation model to retrieve dialect words within U.S. is available. The code and the evaluation dataset can be found here. It was selected as one of the outstanding papers!
  • The Youtube Demo and Web UI of our geolocation tool is ready to use. The corresponding paper is published at ACL 2016, demonstration papers.
  • Our paper on geolocation of social media users is accepted at ACL 2015. We use social relationships and also tweet content of Twitter users to find where they live!
  • Our paper on geolocation of social media users is accepted at NAACL 2015. We use social relationships and also tweet content of Twitter users to find where they live!

Selected Papers

Fairness-aware Class Imbalanced Learning
Shivashankar Subramanian, Afshin Rahimi, Timothy Baldwin, Trevor Cohn, Lea Frermann. In EMNLP 2021., 2019.
Abstract Code
WikiUMLS: Aligning UMLS to Wikipedia via Cross-lingual Neural Ranking
Afshin Rahimi, Timothy Baldwin, Karin Verspoor. In COLING 2020., 2020.
Abstract Code
IndoLEM and IndoBERT: A Benchmark Dataset and Pre-trained Language Model for Indonesian NLP
F Koto, A Rahimi, JH Lau, T Baldwin. In COLING 2020., 2020.
Abstract Code
Massively Multilingual Transfer for NER
Afshin Rahimi, Yuan Li, and Trevor Cohn. In ACL 2019., 2019.
Abstract Code
Semi-supervised User Geolocation via Graph Convolutional Networks
Afshin Rahimi, Trevor Cohn and Timothy Baldwin. In ACL 2018., 2018.
Abstract Code
Continuous Representation of Location for Geolocation and Lexical Dialectology using Mixture Density Networks
Afshin Rahimi, Timothy Baldwin and Trevor Cohn. In EMNLP 2017., 2017.
Abstract Code
A Neural Model for User Geolocation and Lexical Dialectology
Afshin Rahimi, Trevor Cohn and Timothy Baldwin. In ACL 2017, Short papers., 2017.
Abstract Code
pigeo, A Python Geotagging Tool
Afshin Rahimi, Trevor Cohn and Timothy Baldwin. In ACL 2016, Demonstration papers., 2016.
Abstract Code
Twitter User Geolocation Using a Unified Text and Network Prediction Model
Afshin Rahimi, Trevor Cohn and Timothy Baldwin. In ACL 2015, Short papers., 2015.
Abstract Code
Exploiting text and network context for geolocation of social media users
Afshin Rahimi, Duy Vu, Trevor Cohn and Timothy Baldwin. In NAACL-HLT 2015, Short papers., 2015.
Abstract Code