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Donya Rooein

Postdoctoral Fellow
ETH Zurich
donya.rooein (at) gmail.com

About Me

I study how language technologies can be made more useful, fair, and human-centred, with a particular focus on education and young users.

My research sits at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Human-Computer Interaction, with a strong emphasis on educational applications. I am particularly interested in evaluating large language models in educational settings, especially for young users, and in understanding how culture, difficulty, fairness, and human factors shape AI systems in practice.

I am also interested in NLP for social good, including biases and social norms for low-resource languages such as Farsi.

I received my Ph.D. in Information Technology Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, and I worked with Prof. Dirk Hovy at the MilaNLP Group (MilaNLP Lab), where I contribute to INTERGRATOR, a project studying demographic factors in language technologies and their implications for the future of conversational AI.y

Recent News

Selected Projects

KidAlign AI project illustration

KidAlign AI

Survey-based research on how children use AI across learning, creativity, social interaction, and emotional support, bringing together the perspectives of children, parents, and educators to identify safety gaps and design needs.

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PATS project illustration

PATS

Personality-Aware Teaching Strategies with Large Language Model Tutors, grounded in learning science and LLM-based evaluation of tutoring strategies.

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Biased Tales project image

Biased Tales

A dataset for analyzing how biases influence protagonists' attributes and story elements in LLM-generated stories for children.

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LegalBot project image

LegalBot

A collaboration between Politecnico di Milano and Tribunale di Milano aimed at improving access to legal information through a conversational interface.

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TalkyTutor project image

TalkyTutor

An adaptive educational chatbot built with the aCHAT framework so teachers and other non-technical users can customize content and conversational learning flows.

Publications

Please find all publications on my Google Scholar.

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Datasets

  • PATS — Personality-aware teaching dialogues at three difficulty levels (stories & images). Dataset
  • Biased Tales — Cultural and topic bias in LLM-generated children's stories. Dataset
  • Farsi Subjective Tasks — Survey of 110 papers on sentiment, emotion, and toxicity detection in Farsi. Dataset
  • GBFA — Farsi translations of ISEAR, BBQ, and HONEST for gender bias evaluation in Farsi LMs. Dataset
  • ISN — Iranian Social Norms: 1,699 bilingual (Farsi/English) samples labelled with social norms. Dataset


Feel free to use my website's source code.