Soroosh Akef has been working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Language and AI in Education lab of the IWM since January 2026. His research involves using computational linguistics and machine learning techniques to gain insights into the developmental trajectories of language learners and to match them to educational materials optimally fostering their language acquisition.

Having been an English teacher for many years and having received his bachelor’s degree in English language and literature, Soroosh did his master’s degree in computational linguistics at the Sharif University of Technology with the intent of optimizing language education. Soroosh’s Ph.D. project at the University of Lisbon involved extracting pedagogically informative features from both Portuguese learners’ texts and educational materials to classify them according to proficiency or readability level. As a part of his Ph.D. project, he developed the system SABER, aiding Portuguese second language teachers select reading texts appropriate for their learners’ proficiency level.

Main research topics

• Language learner proficiency characterization

• Automatic readability assessment

• Learner modeling

• Second language acquisition