Dr. Soroosh Akef is a postdoctoral researcher at the Language and AI in Education lab of the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, where he investigates language learner proficiency characterization and readability assessment through methods from computational linguistics and machine learning. Coming from a background of teaching English as a foreign language, he obtained his bachelor’s degree in English language and literature from the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and his master’s degree in computational linguistics from the Sharif University of Technology. His PhD at the University of Lisbon focused on heritage language learners of European Portuguese, and he developed the system SABER, which facilitated the extraction of pedagogically informed linguistic features from both learner-produced and expert-written texts. His current research pursues methodological innovations allowing for the extraction of further pedagogically relevant features and their utilization in second language acquisition and readability research.

Main research topics

• Language learner proficiency characterization

• Automatic readability assessment

• Learner modeling

• Second language acquisition