Zhivar Sourati

I am Zhivar Sourati, a fourth-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California. My research focuses on the reasoning capabilities of language models from a cognitive psychology perspective, investigating topics such as analogical reasoning and prototype-based reasoning to improve and evaluate accuracy, robustness, and interpretability in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Additionally, I study the broader sociolinguistic and cognitive dynamics of human–AI collaboration, examining how language technologies shape communication and expression in human interaction.

I began my Ph.D. research working with Dr. Filip Ilievski on cognitively inspired methods for reasoning in language models, including analogical reasoning and prototype-based reasoning, which has remained a central part of my work. Under the guidance of Dr. Morteza Dehghani, I later expanded my focus to explore the interaction between linguistic behavior and emerging forms of human–AI collaboration from a sociolinguistic perspective, while continuing my research on analogical reasoning mechanisms.

Beyond my work at USC, I have collaborated with Dr. Dan Roth (Oracle) on multi-modal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for visually rich document understanding, Dr. Fred Morstatter (ISI) on factors influencing LLMs’ decision-making, with Dr. Don Tuggener and Dr. Mark Cieliebak (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) on dialogue summarization, and began my research journey as a research assistant with Dr. Behnam Bahrak, focusing on permutation tests and complex networks.

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