Zhivar Sourati

I am Zhivar Sourati, a third year computer science Ph.D. student at University of Southern California advised by Dr. Morteza Dehghani. During my Ph.D., I also had the chance to collaborate with Dr. Fred Morstatter (USC / ISI) and Dr. Filip Ilievski (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). My research focuses on reasoning capabilities of language models from a cognitive psychology perspective, covering topics such as analogical reasoning and prototype-based reasoning, tackling issues such as accuracy, robustness, and interpretability in Natural Language Processing (NLP). I also work on the effects of large language models (LLMs) on society and how people interact with them. Before joining USC, I was an NLP research intern at Zurich University of Applied Sciences collaborating with Dr. Don Tuggener and Dr. Mark Cieliebak working on Dialogue Summarization. I started my research career as a research assistant in a team supervised by Dr. Behnam Bahrak, working on permutation tests and complex networks.

My research interests further include NLP in general, social network analysis, knowledge graphs, and data mining, with a focus on interdisciplinary problems at the intersection of computer science, economics, psychology, and social sciences.