My Introduction
I am Mehrdad Rafiepour (مهرداد رفیعی پور), a PhD candidate at the Northeastern University London focusing on transformer-based models for intelligent organizational decision making. I'm interested in improving large language models by enhancing their capability to understand structured data where the structure itself contains information. This field poses new challenges that are handled on a case-by-case basis. The next step is to automate this process so an LLM can easily comprehend the structure.
In general, I think NLP is at the forefront of science and will reshape how we live our lives in the near future. This change should be for the good and be focused on improving efficiency in organizations and promote well-informed decision making.
Prior to graduate school and alongside my undergraduate studies, I spent five years as an entrepreneur, programming mobile apps & backend services for the Iranian local market. My background in both the industry and academia gives me a unique perspective on their challenges and benefits. I'm choosing to stay in academia in the future because I feel there is no point in discovering new knowledge if you're the only one benefiting from it.
If you share my interests, I am open to productive collaborations.
Research Interests
🔹 Large Language Models:
▫️ Instruction-Following
▫️ Explainability
▫️ Evaluation
▫️ MultiLingual & Lowresource Languages
▫️ Augmentation with Graphs
🔹 Natural Language Processing for Social Good