Malihe Alikhani

Malihe Alikhani is an Assistant Professor at Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution specializing in AI policy, and serves as the Ethics Chair of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She is also a member of the Northeastern Ethics Institute. Her research focuses on developing AI systems that enhance communication, decision-making, and knowledge-sharing through rigorous integration of cognitive and social sciences with machine learning.

Her work spans academic, policy, and applied research domains, emphasizing contextual AI systems. She leads the Contextual AI Lab, which develops models capturing human interpretation to support collaborative meaning construction between humans and machines. Her recent publications address uncertainty modeling in dialogue systems, bias mitigation in sign language processing, and ethical AI frameworks.

Key contributions include:

• Advancing sign language understanding in NLP
• Developing uncertainty-aware dialogue systems
• Creating discourse-coherent task-oriented dialogue frameworks
• Formalizing equity in text generation

Scientific Awards:

• Best Theme Paper Award (ACL 2021)
• Best Paper Award (UAI 2022)

She mentors students and researchers in areas spanning sign language processing, dialogue systems, and ethical AI. Her lab collaborates with Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing communities and cognitive science experts to ensure inclusive AI development.