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fsamir at mail dot ubc dot ca


Hello! I’m Samir, a third-year PhD student in the Natural Language Processing Group at the University of British Columbia. My research is supported by a Doctoral Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). I'm broadly interested in applied and theoretical aspects of multilingual natural language processing, and I work with both text and audio modalities. Before I came to UBC, I completed my MSc in the Computational Linguistics group at the University of Toronto. Prior to graduate school, I completed my Bachelor of Science (Honours Computer Science) at the University of Toronto.

For the 2023-2024 academic year, I’m visiting the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, where I’m fortunate to be working with Prof. Yulia Tsvetkov’s group.


Selected publications

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The taste of IPA: Towards open-vocabulary keyword matching and forced alignment in any language

NAACL 2024 [to appear]

Jian Zhu, Changbing Yang, Farhan Samir, Jahurul Islam

Understanding compositional data augmentation in typologically diverse morphological inflection

EMNLP 2023 [oral presentation] [🏆 outstanding paper award]

Farhan Samir, Miikka Silfverberg

[preprint]

One Wug, Two Wug+s Transformer Inflection Models Hallucinate Affixes

ComputEL @ ACL 2022 [oral presentation]

Farhan Samir, Miikka Silfverberg

[paper]

Quantifying cognitive factors in lexical decline

TACL

David Francis, Ella Rabinovich, Farhan Samir, David Mortensen, Suzanne Stevenson

[paper][code and data]

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A formidable ability: Detecting adjectival extremeness with Distributional Semantic Models

ACL Findings 2021

Farhan Samir, Barend Beekhuizen, Suzanne Stevenson

[paper][code and data]


Industry research experience

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Summer 2023, Sunnyvale CA

Applied Scientist Intern @ Amazon Science.

Summer 2022, Toronto ON

Worked with Griffin Lacey and Graham Taylor on developing scalable Transformer-based Graph Neural Networks.

Undergraduate research advising

I'm interested in advising undergraduate students (or applied master's students) on doing high-quality multilingual NLP research, specifically students who have no prior NLP research experience. I'm open to working with students from any disciplinary background.

I don't have any more capacity for the upcoming term (January - April), but I will be looking for new mentees to work with in the Spring/Summer. Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] to discuss opportunities.

Current mentees:

Angela Li (UBC; co-advised with Prof. Miikka Silfverberg)

David Zhang (UBC; co-advised with Prof. Jian Zhu)

Alexa Gogoescu (UBC; co-advised with Prof. Vered Shwartz)

Nathan Roll (UCSB BA 2023; co-advised with Prof. Jian Zhu)