Farid Ariai

Farid Ariai

PhD Candidate in Data Science at The University of Queensland

Farid Ariai

I am a second-year Data Science PhD student at The University of Queensland in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, supervised by Professor Gianluca Demartini and Dr Joel Mackenzie. My research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP) with applications in the legal domain, examining how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be effectively utilised in legal contexts to improve their performance and applicability.

I am also part of the Digital Deliberative Democracy (D3) Project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The project, Large-Scale Political Participation: Issue Identification, Deliberation, and Co-creation, investigates the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance public deliberation processes. It explores how technology-supported, large-scale crowd computing approaches can strengthen democratic consultation and popular initiative procedures—two of the most impactful participatory mechanisms in direct democracy. These procedures allow citizens to both strongly influence political outcomes and set the political agenda. The project aims to design novel hybrid human–machine systems that cultivate, coordinate, and support participants through coordination technologies and AI in real-world democratic settings.

At UQ, I serve as a tutor for CSSE7030 – Introduction to Programming.

Current research activities include:

  • Conducting a comprehensive survey of NLP for the legal domain (ongoing)
  • Investigating the impact of Named Entity Recognition on legal question answering and classification (ongoing)
  • Examining how AI tools influence the quality of online political deliberation, participation equality, opinion change, and satisfaction with outcomes (ongoing)

I hold a Master’s degree in Software Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran, with a focus on big data and machine learning. My thesis research applied the ParsBERT model and PersianNLU dataset to improve model effectiveness in aspect-based sentiment analysis task. I graduated ranked first in my Master’s cohort (12 students) for academic excellence. I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran.