Parisa Kordjamshidi

Parisa Kordjamshidi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, specializing in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and neurosymbolic reasoning. Her research encompasses natural language processing, the integration of vision and language, and neurosymbolic AI. Kordjamshidi earned a doctorate from KU Leuven and completed postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Michigan State, she held a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor at Tulane University and as a Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

At Michigan State, Kordjamshidi directs the Heterogeneous Learning and Reasoning Lab. Her work focuses on extracting formal semantics and structured representations from natural language, with particular emphasis on spatial semantics representation. A central contribution of her lab is the development of DomiKnowS, a neurosymbolic programming framework that leverages both symbolic and sub-symbolic representations to address complex AI problems. DomiKnowS integrates symbolic and logical knowledge into deep learning models through various algorithms. Kordjamshidi has demonstrated how neurosymbolic AI can enhance transparency, explainability, and reliability in AI systems, with applications in safety-critical robotics and other high-stakes environments.

Kordjamshidi's research has received over 2,500 citations and spans natural language processing, vision and language, neurosymbolic AI, and spatial language understanding. She is the co-author of the book "Spatial Language Understanding: Representation, Reasoning, and Grounding," which examines multiple aspects of spatial language understanding and recent trends in modeling with large foundational models. Her work has been published at leading venues including AAAI, NAACL, EMNLP, ICLR, and ACL. Her research on in-context examples in regression with large language models received an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL.

Her awards and grants include an NSF CAREER Award for research on learning and reasoning in spatial language understanding, an Office of Naval Research grant under the Science of AI program for integrating domain knowledge into statistical learning, an Amazon Faculty Research Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, and recognition as a Rising Star at MIT EECS. Kordjamshidi serves the research community in editorial and organizational roles, including as a Senior Area Chair at NAACL, EMNLP, and AAAI, and as an action editor for the ACL Rolling Review system and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

Beyond academia, Kordjamshidi participates in public discussions about the future of AI. She has appeared at forums such as SXSW, including on the panel "Who Predicts Better and Why? Humans, AI, and the Anatomy of a Forecast," which brought together perspectives from economics, computer science, media, and advertising. Her work informs approaches to building AI systems that are interpretable, trustworthy, and grounded in real-world reasoning.