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Zoorna Institute for Language, AI and Society (USA)
Karine Megerdoomian is Founder and Director of the Zoorna Institute for Language, AI & Society and a computational linguist and AI researcher specializing in multilingual and culturally grounded AI, Iranian languages, and NLP for low-resource and marginalized language communities. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California and previously served as
a Principal AI Engineer at MITRE. Her research spans Persian and Iranian-language NLP, cultural
and sociopragmatic evaluation of AI systems, responsible AI, and community-centered approaches
to language technology. She was lead computational linguist for Shiraz, an early Persian–English
machine translation system, and has organized international workshops including the Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-Based Languages series and the inaugural SilkRoadNLP workshop.
University of Washington (USA)
Rayyan Merchant is an M.S. student whose research focuses on NLP for
social good, low-resource languages, and marginalized
language varieties. He received bachelor’s degrees in Linguistics and Computer Science from
the University of Florida, where his thesis examined machine transliteration between Persian
dialects written in the Tajik Cyrillic and Perso- Arabic writing systems. His research has been presented at venues including EACL, the North
American Conference on Iranian Linguistics, and LREC-COLING. He co-organized the inaugural SilkRoadNLP workshop and served as Publication Chair.
Qatar Computing Research Institute (Qatar)
Ehsaneddin Asgari is a scientist at the Qatar Computing Research
Institute specializing in multilingual and multimodal NLP with a focus on West Asian languages. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of
California, Berkeley, and an M.S. from EPFL, and has held research positions at MIT, LMU Munich,
Volkswagen Group Data:Lab, and Helmholtz Research Center. His work on Iranian languages includes
large-scale evaluation of Persian language models, information extraction, Persian poetry
modeling, and resources for Kurdish, Luri, Tajik, Azeri, and Pahlavi. He has served in senior reviewing
and organizational roles across ACL and other major machine-learning venues.
Organizers and Community
SilkRoadNLP is a community-driven initiative supported by researchers, linguists, and practitioners working across disciplines and regions.