I am a theoretical and computational linguist specializing in less commonly taught languages, with emphasis on Persian and Armenian. I'm interested in applying natural language processing to social media analysis with a focus on Persian language blogs. My current research focuses on identifying the language of social groups in the blogosphere, studying language change and rhetoric, and automatic sentiment analysis. My previous computational experience has been mainly in morphological analysis, machine translation, information extraction, and lexical semantics. My research also focuses on complex verbal predicates and Multiword Expressions, the syntax-morphology interface, and Persian heritage language.

I am currently a Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer in Human Language Technology at MITRE. Prior to working at MITRE, I have worked as a computational linguist in the Computing Research Lab (CRL) in New Mexico, at Inxight Software (now SAP) in California, at the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) at the University of Maryland, and have taught Persian and Armenian heritage language analysis at UC San Diego.

I have founded the Society for Iranian Linguistics (SFIL) and am co-organizer of CAASL (workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages).

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Languages
Persian, Eastern Armenian, English, French (native/near-native).
Western Armenian, Italian, Spanish (reading and basic conversation proficiency).
Basic working knowledge of Arabic.

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