Elnaz Rahmati
2026
The Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus
Jackson P. Trager | Alireza S. Ziabari | Elnaz Rahmati | Aida Mostafazadeh Davani | Preni Golazizian | Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi | Ali Omrani | Zhihe Li | Brendan Kennedy | Georgios Chochlakis | Nils Karl Reimer | Melissa Reyes | Kesley Cheng | Mellow Wei | Christina Merrifield | Arta Khosravi | Evans Alvarez | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Jackson P. Trager | Alireza S. Ziabari | Elnaz Rahmati | Aida Mostafazadeh Davani | Preni Golazizian | Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi | Ali Omrani | Zhihe Li | Brendan Kennedy | Georgios Chochlakis | Nils Karl Reimer | Melissa Reyes | Kesley Cheng | Mellow Wei | Christina Merrifield | Arta Khosravi | Evans Alvarez | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Moral framing and sentiment can affect a variety of online and offline behaviors, including donation, environmental action, political engagement, and protest. Various computational methods in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been used to detect moral sentiment from textual data, but achieving strong performance in such subjective tasks requires large, hand-annotated datasets. Previous corpora annotated for moral sentiment have proven valuable and have generated new insights both within NLP and across the social sciences, but have been limited to Twitter. To facilitate improving our understanding of the role of moral rhetoric, we present the Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus, a collection of 16,123 English Reddit comments that have been curated from 12 distinct subreddits, hand-annotated by at least three trained annotators for 8 categories of moral sentiment (i.e., Care, Proportionality, Equality, Purity, Authority, Loyalty, Thin Morality, Implicit/Explicit Morality) based on the updated Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) framework. We evaluate baselines using large language models (Llama3-8B, Ministral-8B) in zero-shot, few-shot, and PEFT (Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning) settings, comparing their performance to fine-tuned encoder-only models like BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). The results show that LLMs continue to lag behind fine-tuned encoders on this subjective task, underscoring the ongoing need for human-annotated moral corpora for AI alignment evaluation
Flip-Flop Consistency: Unsupervised Training for Robustness to Prompt Perturbations in LLMs
Parsa Hejabi | Elnaz Rahmati | Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Parsa Hejabi | Elnaz Rahmati | Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce inconsistent answers when faced with different phrasings of the same prompt. In this paper, we propose Flip-Flop Consistency (F2C), an unsupervised training method that improves robustness to such perturbations. F2C is composed of two key components. The first, Consensus Cross-Entropy (CCE), uses a majority vote across prompt variations to create a hard pseudo-label. The second is a representation alignment loss that pulls lower-confidence and non-majority predictors toward the consensus established by high-confidence, majority-voting variations. We evaluate our method on 11 datasets spanning four NLP tasks, with 4–15 prompt variations per dataset. On average, F2C raises observed agreement by 11.62%, improves mean F1 by 8.94%, and reduces performance variance across formats by 3.29%. In out-of-domain evaluations, F2C generalizes effectively, increasing ̅F1 and agreement while decreasing variance across most source-target pairs. Finally, when trained on only a subset of prompt perturbations and evaluated on held-out formats, F2C consistently improves both performance and agreement while reducing variance. These findings highlight F2C as an effective unsupervised method for enhancing LLM consistency, performance, and generalization under prompt perturbations.
The Subjectivity of Respect in Police Traffic Stops: Modeling Community Perspectives in Body-Worn Camera Footage
Preni Golazizian | Elnaz Rahmati | Jackson Trager | Zhivar Sourati | Nona Ghazizadeh | Georgios Chochlakis | Jose J. Alcocer | Kerby Bennett | Aarya Vijay Devnani | Parsa Hejabi | Harry G. Muttram | Akshay Kiran Padte | Mehrshad Saadatinia | Chenhao Wu | Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari | Michael Sierra-Arévalo | Nicholas Weller | Shrikanth Narayanan | Benjamin A.T. Graham | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Preni Golazizian | Elnaz Rahmati | Jackson Trager | Zhivar Sourati | Nona Ghazizadeh | Georgios Chochlakis | Jose J. Alcocer | Kerby Bennett | Aarya Vijay Devnani | Parsa Hejabi | Harry G. Muttram | Akshay Kiran Padte | Mehrshad Saadatinia | Chenhao Wu | Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari | Michael Sierra-Arévalo | Nicholas Weller | Shrikanth Narayanan | Benjamin A.T. Graham | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Traffic stops are among the most frequent police–civilian interactions, and body-worn cameras (BWCs) provide a unique record of how these encounters unfold. Respect is a central dimension of these interactions, shaping public trust and perceived legitimacy, yet its interpretation is inherently subjective and shaped by lived experience, rendering community-specific perspectives a critical consideration. Leveraging unprecedented access to Los Angeles Police Department BWC footage, we introduce the first large-scale traffic-stop dataset annotated with respect ratings and free-text rationales from multiple perspectives. By sampling annotators from police-affiliated, justice-system-impacted, and non-affiliated Los Angeles residents, we enable the systematic study of perceptual differences across diverse communities. To this end, (i) we develop a domain-specific evaluation rubric grounded in procedural justice theory, LAPD training materials, and extensive fieldwork; (ii) we introduce a criterion-driven preference data construction framework for perspective-consistent alignment, and (ii) we propose a perspective-aware modeling framework that predicts personalized respect ratings and generates annotator-specific rationales for both officers and civilian drivers from traffic-stop transcripts. Across all three annotator groups, our approach improves both rating prediction performance and rationale alignment. Our perspective-aware framework enables law enforcement to better understand diverse community expectations, providing a vital tool for building public trust and procedural legitimacy.
2025
CoCo-CoLa: Evaluating and Improving Language Adherence in Multilingual LLMs
Elnaz Rahmati | Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2025)
Elnaz Rahmati | Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2025)
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) develop cross-lingual abilities despite being trained on limited parallel data. However, they often struggle to generate responses in the intended language, favoring high-resource languages such as English. In this work, we introduce CoCo-CoLa (Correct Concept - Correct Language), a novel metric to evaluate language adherence in multilingual LLMs. Using fine-tuning experiments on a closed-book QA task across seven languages, we analyze how training in one language affects others’ performance. Our findings reveal that multilingual models share task knowledge across languages but exhibit biases in the selection of output language. We identify language-specific layers, showing that final layers play a crucial role in determining output language. Accordingly, we propose a partial training strategy that selectively fine-tunes key layers, improving language adherence while reducing computational cost. Our method achieves comparable or superior performance to full fine-tuning, particularly for low-resource languages, offering a more efficient multilingual adaptation.
2024
GE2PE: Persian End-to-End Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion
Elnaz Rahmati | Hossein Sameti
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Elnaz Rahmati | Hossein Sameti
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems have made significant strides, enabling the generation of speech from grapheme sequences. However, for low-resource languages, these models still struggle to produce natural and intelligible speech. Grapheme-to-Phoneme conversion (G2P) addresses this challenge by enhancing the input sequence with phonetic information. Despite these advancements, existing G2P systems face limitations when dealing with Persian texts due to the complexity of Persian transcription. In this study, we focus on enriching resources for the Persian language. To achieve this, we introduce two novel G2P training datasets: one manually labeled and the other machine-generated. These datasets comprise over five million sentences alongside their corresponding phoneme sequences. Additionally, we propose two evaluation datasets tailored for Persian sub-tasks, including Kasre-Ezafe detection, homograph disambiguation, and handling out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. To tackle the unique challenges of the Persian language, we develop a new sentence-level End-to-End (E2E) model leveraging a two-step training approach, as outlined in our paper, to maximize the impact of manually labeled data. The results show that our model surpasses the state-of-the-art performance by 1.86% in word error rate, 4.03% in Kasre-Ezafe detection recall, and 3.42% in homograph disambiguation accuracy.
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- Morteza Dehghani 4
- Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari 3
- Georgios Chochlakis 2
- Preni Golazizian 2
- Parsa Hejabi 2
- Jose J. Alcocer 1
- Evans Alvarez 1
- Kerby Bennett 1
- Kesley Cheng 1
- Aida Mostafazadeh Davani 1
- Aarya Vijay Devnani 1
- Nona Ghazizadeh 1
- Benjamin A.T. Graham 1
- Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi 1
- Nils Karl Reimer 1
- Brendan Kennedy 1
- Arta Khosravi 1
- Zhihe Li 1
- Christina Merrifield 1
- Harry G. Muttram 1
- Shrikanth Narayanan 1
- Ali Omrani 1
- Akshay Kiran Padte 1
- Melissa Reyes 1
- Alireza S. Ziabari 1
- Mehrshad Saadatinia 1
- Hossein Sameti 1
- Michael Sierra-Arévalo 1
- Zhivar Sourati 1
- Jackson Trager 1
- Jackson P. Trager 1
- Mellow Wei 1
- Nicholas Weller 1
- Chenhao Wu 1