CV
Employment
Computational Linguist & Data Scientist, University of Cologne, Germany
Data Center for the Humanities (DCH) and the linguistics labs of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (XLinC Lab, Phonetics Lab)
- Building the Experimental Service Hub: workflows, web presence, and participant database
- Programming experiments (audio/video, reaction time, eye-tracking, EEG) and analysis pipelines
- Research data management and archiving
- Consultation hours, trainings, and workshops for researchers
Data Scientist, Trivago N.V., Düsseldorf, Germany
- Built rule-based, ML, and LLM models for tasks such as matching, deduplication, and data enrichment
- Developed and optimised BigQuery SQL and Python pipelines at scale
- Performed exploratory data analysis, statistical analysis, anomaly detection, data transformation, and visualisation
- Collaborated with back-end engineers to bring scalable models into production
Research Associate, University of Cologne, Germany
Collaborative Research Center "Prominence in Language" (SFB 1252), project "INF – Infrastructure: Data, Design and Sustainability"; PIs: Prof. Dr. Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Prof. Dr. Nils Reiter
- Coordinated sustainable data management for ~20 research projects in line with DFG regulations, including long-term archiving, metadata, and open science practices
- Supported projects with data workflows: preprocessing, automatic annotation, data wrangling, and visualisation
- Advised projects on experimental design, corpus design, survey design, and annotation practices
Research Associate, University of Cologne, Germany
DFG project "The relation between grammar and usage: null subjects and subject position in Spanish and Persian"; PI: Prof. Dr. Aria Adli
- Multi-layer annotation of Persian spontaneous speech
- Data preparation and transformation
- Hierarchical data representation following ISO frameworks (MAF, SynAF) and TEI guidelines
Education
PhD in Linguistics (magna cum laude), University of Cologne, Germany
Thesis: Referring Expression Generation in Context: Combining Linguistic and Computational Approaches
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Prof. Dr. Kees van Deemter
Research Master's in Linguistics, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Thesis: The Vector-based Semantics of Distal PP Modification
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Yoad Winter, Dr. Choonkyu Lee
Exchange Student, Cognitive Science Department, and Intern, Mercator Research Group, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
M.A. in General Linguistics, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Iran
Thesis: The Morpho-semantic Analysis of Bahuvrihi Compounds in Persian
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Koorosh Safavi
B.A. in English Language and Literature, University of Isfahan, Iran
Publications
Book
- Fahime Same. 2024. Referring Expression Generation in Context: Combining Linguistic and Computational Approaches. Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface. Berlin: Language Science Press. langsci-press.org/catalog/book/451
Peer-reviewed articles
- Yayun Zhang, Guanyi Chen, Fahime Same, Saad Mahamood, and Tingting He. 2026. How Do People Quantify Naturally: Evidence from Mandarin Picture Description. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2026), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. arXiv
- Fahime Same, Saad Mahamood, and Srinivas Ramesh Kamath. 2026. A Comparative Evaluation of End-to-End and Pipeline Approaches for Summarisation. In Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Natural Language Generation Evaluations, pages 39–52, Aberdeen, United Kingdom. ACL Anthology
- Patrícia Schmidtová, Eduardo Calò, Simone Balloccu, Dimitra Gkatzia, Rudali Huidrom, Mateusz Lango, Fahime Same, Vilém Zouhar, Saad Mahamood, and Ondřej Dušek. 2025. Do My Eyes Deceive Me? A Survey of Human Evaluations of Hallucinations in NLG. In Proceedings of the 18th International Natural Language Generation Conference, pages 60–79, Hanoi, Vietnam. ACL Anthology
- Chengzhao Wu, Guanyi Chen, Fahime Same, and Tingting He. 2025. Analysing Reference Production of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 18th International Natural Language Generation Conference, pages 182–194, Hanoi, Vietnam. ACL Anthology
- Guanyi Chen, Fahime Same, and Kees van Deemter. 2024. Intrinsic Task-based Evaluation for Referring Expression Generation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7220–7231, Bangkok, Thailand. ACL Anthology
- Srinivas Ramesh Kamath, Fahime Same, and Saad Mahamood. 2024. Generating Hotel Highlights from Unstructured Text using LLMs. In Proceedings of the 17th International Natural Language Generation Conference, pages 280–288, Tokyo, Japan. ACL Anthology
- Katja Jasinskaja, Yuting Li, Fahime Same, and David Uerlings. 2024. Reference and Discourse Structure Annotation of Elicited Chat Continuations in German. In Proceedings of the 18th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVIII), pages 176–187, St. Julian's, Malta. ACL Anthology
- T. Mark Ellison and Fahime Same. 2024. Experimental versus In-Corpus Variation in Referring Expression Choice. In Proceedings of LREC-COLING 2024, pages 6838–6848, Turin, Italy. ACL Anthology
- Fahime Same, Guanyi Chen, and Kees van Deemter. 2023. Models of Reference Production: How Do They Withstand the Test of Time? In Proceedings of the 16th International Natural Language Generation Conference, pages 93–105, Prague, Czechia. ACL Anthology
- Magdalena Repp, Petra B. Schumacher, and Fahime Same. 2023. Multi-layered Annotation of Conversation-like Narratives in German. In Proceedings of the 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVII), pages 61–72, Toronto, Canada. ACL Anthology
- Guanyi Chen, Fahime Same, and Kees van Deemter. 2023. Neural Referential Form Selection: Generalisability and Interpretability. Computer Speech & Language, 79, 101466. DOI
- Fahime Same, Guanyi Chen, and Kees van Deemter. 2022. Non-neural Models Matter: A Re-evaluation of Neural Referring Expression Generation Systems. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5554–5567, Dublin, Ireland. ACL Anthology
- T. Mark Ellison and Fahime Same. 2022. Constructing Distributions of Variation in Referring Expression Type from Corpora for Model Evaluation. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2989–2997, Marseille, France. ACL Anthology
- Guanyi Chen, Fahime Same, and Kees van Deemter. 2022. Assessing Neural Referential Form Selectors on a Realistic Multilingual Dataset. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems (Eval4NLP). ACL Anthology
- Guanyi Chen, Fahime Same, and Kees van Deemter. 2021. What Can Neural Referential Form Selectors Learn? In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pages 154–166, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. ACL Anthology
- Fahime Same and Kees van Deemter. 2020. A Linguistic Perspective on Reference: Choosing a Feature Set for Generating Referring Expressions in Context. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), pages 4575–4586, Barcelona, Spain (Online). ACL Anthology
- Fahime Same and Kees van Deemter. 2020. Computational Interpretations of Recency for the Choice of Referring Expressions in Discourse. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI), pages 113–123, Online. ACL Anthology
- Andrea Gobbo and Fahime Same. 2016. 20 Years of UK Budget Speeches: Correspondence Analysis vs. Networks of N-grams. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Statistical Analysis of Textual Data (JADT 2016), Nice, France.
Teaching
Practical Skills for Working with Linguistic Data (Master's course, University of Cologne); rated 4.8 / 5 in the faculty evaluation, top 25% of linguistics courses that semester. Course material
Crosslinguistic Corpus Linguistics (Master's course, University of Cologne), with Dr. Maria Bardají i Farré
Data Transformation and Wrangling in R (workshop, University of Cologne)
LaTeX for Linguists (PhD-level workshop series, University of Cologne)
Selected Talks and Posters
- PLeW-NLG: Interactive Exploration of Human Evaluation Data across NLG Tasks. INLG 2026, Utrecht, the Netherlands, October 2026. Poster
- A Comparative Evaluation of End-to-End and Pipeline Approaches for Summarisation. INLG 2026, Utrecht, the Netherlands, October 2026. Poster
- Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Layered Human Evaluation for Reliable NLG Assessment. DCU NLP Seminar Series, Dublin, Ireland (online), June 2025.
- Learnings from NLP Conferences (with Saad Mahamood, Srinivas Ramesh Kamath, and Patrícia Schmidtová). Trivago AI Meetup, Düsseldorf, Germany, January 2025.
- Human Evaluation: Why the Choice of Approach is Key. Computational Linguistics in the Hothouse, Utrecht, the Netherlands, July 2024.
- Models of Reference Production: How Do They Withstand the Test of Time? (with Guanyi Chen and Kees van Deemter). INLG 2023, Prague, Czechia, September 2023.
- Variation in the Choice of Referring Expressions in Context. Utrecht NLP Group, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, March 2023.
- Referring Expression Generation in Context: Combining Linguistic and Computational Approaches. University of Cologne, August 2022.
- Constructing Distributions of Variation in Referring Expression Type from Corpora for Model Evaluation (with T. Mark Ellison). LREC 2022, Marseille, France, June 2022.
- Non-neural Models Matter: A Re-evaluation of Neural Referring Expression Generation Systems (with Guanyi Chen and Kees van Deemter). ACL 2022, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022.
- Referring Expression Generation in Context: The Choice of Corpus. Workshop "NLP Meets Linguistics", Utrecht University, the Netherlands, April 2022.
- What Can Neural Referential Form Selectors Learn? (with Guanyi Chen and Kees van Deemter). INLG 2021, Aberdeen, Scotland (online), September 2021.
- Choosing a Feature Set for Generating Referring Expressions in Context (with Kees van Deemter). COLING 2020 (online), December 2020.
- Annotating Non-standard Corpora: State of the Art and Open Questions (with Stefan Hartmann and Eric Engel). International Workshop on the Annotation of Non-Standard Corpora, Bamberg, Germany, September 2019.
- MultiSub: A Multi-parallel Corpus of Movie Subtitles (with Laura Becker and Alessia Cassarà). 41st Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), University of Bremen, March 2019.
- A Stand-off XML-TEI Representation of Reference Annotation (with Aria Adli, Eric Engel, and Laurent Romary). 40th Annual Meeting of the DGfS, Computational Linguistics Section, Stuttgart, 2018. HAL
- Homogeneous Annotation of Dependency Relations Using Universal Dependencies (UD): The Case of P-drop in Persian. Grammar and Corpora 2018, University of Paris-Diderot, Paris, 2018.
- Morpho-semantic Analysis of Bahuvrihi Compounds in Persian. International Conference on Word Formats and Lexical Combinations, Roma Tre University, Italy, January 2016.
- Does Typicality Conform to the Principle of Compositionality? A Conceptual-Compositional Perspective. 17th International Workshop on Roots of Pragmasemantics, Szklarska Poręba, Poland, March 2016.
Awards, Scholarships, and Funds
Cologne Center of Language Sciences (CCLS) Junior Special Fund
Cologne Center of Language Sciences (CCLS) Junior Workshop Funding
Erasmus Placement Scholarship
Utrecht Excellence Scholarship
6th rank in the nationwide entrance examination of Iranian universities in Linguistics
Skills
- Programming: Python, R, SQL
- Cloud and big data (GCP): BigQuery, BigQuery ML, Looker
- Machine learning: classical methods (linear/logistic regression, tree-based and ensemble models); deep learning (CNNs, RNNs/LSTMs); transformer-based LLMs
- NLP toolkits: spaCy, NLTK, UDPipe, Quanteda, Hugging Face Transformers
- Annotation and corpus tools: INCePTION, WebAnno, MMAX2, ELAN, Sketch Engine (CQL)
- Survey and crowdsourcing platforms: Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific, Qualtrics, Google Forms
- Markup and documents: LaTeX, Markdown, XML, XPath, regular expressions
- Version control: Git
Languages
Native
Advanced
Upper-intermediate (B2)
Reading competence for corpus/data work; limited speaking
Reading competence for corpus/data work; limited speaking
Workshops and Training
Deep Learning Specialization, Coursera
DGfS-CL Fall School, Düsseldorf: Creation, use and analysis of lexically annotated resources; Grammar implementation with lexicalized tree adjoining grammars and frame semantics; Deep learning for machine translation; Computational pragmatics
The Data Scientist's Toolbox, Coursera
fMRI training, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Utrecht Summer School, the Netherlands: The neurocognition of bilingualism and cognitive control (2013); Statistics for experimental linguists, Psycholinguistics, Bilingualism, and Introduction to generative syntax (2012)