I am a theoretical and computational linguist specializing in less commonly taught languages, with emphasis on Persian and Armenian. My computational experience has been mainly in morphological analysis, machine translation, information extraction, and lexical semantics.

My current research is on the analysis of Persian language blogs, especially with respect to analyzing Blogspeak, identifying language change, and understanding public opinion. My research also focuses on complex verbal predicates and Multiword Expressions, as well as the syntax-morphology interface.

I am currently a Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer in the Human Language Technology group 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, 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 received a B.S. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California.

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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