Web
		Analytics
Isidora Chara Tourni

About

I am a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Boston University, fortunate to be advised by Derry Tanti Wijaya. My interests lie in the areas of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. My research focuses on developing data-efficient models and techniques for learning from highly complex data, including text, time-series, images, videos and graph-structured data, for a broad spectrum of applications, such as Machine Translation, Social Media Analytics and News Framing. I am particularly interested in learning in low-resource settings, and also in leveraging explainability methods for model improvement.

In the Summer and Fall of 2022 I was a Research Intern at the Google Translate team, working on models for Direct Neural Machine Translation.

Prior to my PhD, I completed my undergraduate studies at the National Technical University of Athens, from which I hold a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering. In parallel to my academic path, I have contributed to a variety of product- and academic research oriented projects in the industry as a Developer and a Researcher, and have previously worked as an intern at SRI International, Electronic Arts and Nokia, as well as collaborated with Johnson & Johnson and Mentat.

For more details you can see my CV. Feel free to contact me for questions or any potential interest.


Publications

Direct Neural Machine Translation with Task-level Mixture-of-Experts models
Isidora Chara Tourni, Subhajit Naskar
Under Submission, 2023

Analyzing Factual Knowledge in Multilingual pretrained Language Models
Jay Gala*, Zeina Saadeddin*, Isidora Chara Tourni
Under Submission, 2023

Relevance-guided Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Isidora Chara Tourni, Derry Tanti Wijaya
Under Submission, 2023

Low-Resource Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: Leveraging Comparable Data, Code-Switching and Compute Resources
Isidora Chara Tourni*, Garry Kuwanto*, Afra Feyza Akyürek*, Siyang Li*, Alex Jones, Derry Tanti Wijaya
Arxiv Preprint, 2021
abstract
Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Lead Images in U.S. Gun Violence Coverage
Isidora Chara Tourni, Taufiq Daryanto, Fabian Zhafransyah, Hengchang Hu, Edward Edberg Halim, Boqi Chen, Sha Lai, Mona Jalal, Margrit Betke, Lei Guo, Prakash Ishwar, Derry Tanti Wijaya
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021.
Presented at FEVER - The Fourth Workshop on Fact Extraction and Verification

video/dataset/abstract
Ani-GIFs: A Benchmark Dataset for Domain Generalization of Action Recognition from GIFs
Isidora Chara Tourni*, Shoumik Majumdar*, Shubhangi Jain*, Arsenii Mustafin*, Diala Lteif, Stan Sclaroff, Kate Saenko, Sarah Adel Bargal
Frontiers in Computer Science, 2022
abstract
Cultural and Geographical Influences on Image Translatability of Words across Languages
Nikzad Khani, Isidora Chara Tourni, Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli, Chris Callison-Burch, Derry Tanti Wijaya
NAACL, 2021
video/code/abstract

Teaching & Mentoring

At Boston University, I have served as a Teaching Assistant for the following courses:

CS 640 - Artificial Intelligence. Instructor: Iddo Drori, Spring 2023
CS 542 - Machine Learning. Instructor: Sarah Adel Bargal, Spring 2020
CS 455 - Computer Networks. Instructor: Mark Crovella, Fall 2019
CS 103 - Introduction to Internet Technologies and Web Programming. Instructor: Vahid Azadeh Ranjbar, Spring & Fall 2018

I am also currently serving as one of the Chairs of WiNLP and as a Fatima Fellowship Research mentor.