Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh

Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh is an Iranian British academic who is a professor at University College London. She was awarded a senior research fellowship at the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2022.

Early life and education Sadrzadeh is from Iran. She received her undergraduate and master's degrees at Sharif University of Technology. After earning her master's degree Sadrzadeh moved to Canada. She was a doctoral researcher first at the University of Ottawa, where she was awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, a University of Ottawa Excellence Scholarship, and a Canada Female Doctoral Student Award, and then at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research considered epistemic logic. Alongside earning her doctorate, Sadrzadeh moved to the University of Oxford as an EPSRC postdoctoral fellow.

Research and career In 2011, Sadrzadeh was awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Career Acceleration Fellowship. She was appointed to the faculty at Queen Mary University of London, where she combined statistical and logical methods to study how language works.

Whilst machine learning can improve reasoning about textual data, systems making use of machine learning cannot be translated to all applications. Sadrzadeh develops tensor-based mathematical models to improve these processes by combining logic, statistics and machine learning to strengthen the information from textual data. These models are based on the DisCoCat framework that she introduced with Bob Coecke and Stephen Clark. She was awarded two industrial fellowships from the Royal Academy of Engineering, which allowed her to build partnerships with the BBC. In particular she concentrated on the development of tensorial analysis for textual understanding of subtitles and news. At the time it was estimated that the average adult spends about one and a half years of their lives trying to device what to watch on broadcasting platforms.

Sadrzadeh is involved in the conference SemSpace (Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science). In 2020, Sadrzadeh gave a talk "Gaussianity and typicality in matrix distributional semantics" and in 2021 she was co-organiser. In 2022, Sadrzadeh was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Fellowship.

Selected publications