I’m a Ph.D. student candidate in the Natural Language Processing Group at the University of British Columbia, where I’m advised by Jian Zhu and Vered Shwartz. My research is supported by a Doctoral Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and an award from the Public Scholars Initiative. 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 was a visiting researcher at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering where I had the good fortune of working with Yulia Tsvetkov, Chan Park, and Sachin Kumar. I was also a research intern at Ai2 Aristo.
I split my time between the mountains (Vancouver and Seattle 🏔) and the concrete (Toronto 🌆). Currently: Toronto.
March 2025 — Giving a guest lecture in Vered Shwartz’ Natural Language Processing class. Will upload slides and a prerecording soon…
Feb 2025 — Last ****paper of my PhD accepted to TACL! 🇦🇹
Feb 2025 — Gave a talk about my forthcoming dissertation at UCSD Linguistics 🏄🏽
Feb 2025 — Awarded the NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship 🇨🇦
Feb 2025 — Getting profiled in UBC Science’s FOCUS magazine about our work on cross-linguistic information gaps in Wikipedia, forthcoming.
Jan 2025 — My mentor Anjalie Field was profiled about our work on cross-linguistic information gaps in Wikipedia; check it out here!
Efficient Identification of Low-Quality Language Partitions in Multilingual Datasets: A Case Study on a Large-Scale Multilingual Audio Dataset
TACL [preprint]
Farhan Samir, Emily P. Ahn, Shreya Prakash, Márton Sóskuthy, Vered Shwartz, Jian Zhu
Locating Information Gaps and Narrative Inconsistencies Across Languages: A Case Study of LGBT People Portrayals on Wikipedia
EMNLP 2024 [poster][proceedings][citation][GitHub][press]
Farhan Samir, Chan Young Park, Anjalie Field, Vered Shwartz, Yulia Tsvetkov
The taste of IPA: Towards open-vocabulary keyword matching and forced alignment in any language
NAACL 2024
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]
Summer 2024, Seattle WA
PhD Research Intern, Aristo team. Mentors: Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Bhavana Dalvi, Harshit Surana, Ben Bogin, Lucy Lu Wang, Peter Clark
Summer 2023, Sunnyvale CA
Applied Scientist Intern @ Amazon Science. Mentors: Daniel Elkind & Timothy Leffel.
Summer 2022, Toronto ON
Worked with Griffin Lacey and Graham Taylor on developing scalable Transformer-based Graph Neural Networks.