Farid Ariai
PhD Candidate in Data Science | Legal NLP and LLM Evaluation
I am a PhD candidate in Data Science at The University of Queensland, in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, supervised by Gianluca Demartini and Joel Mackenzie. My research focuses on natural language processing in the legal domain and the development and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for legal tasks.
I investigate legal retrieval-augmented generation, legal-entity supervision and the quality–resource trade-offs of LLM quantisation. Across these projects, I combine controlled experiments with reproducible research software to understand what affects model performance, when apparent improvements hold, and where systems fail.
Alongside this work, I contribute to the Digital Deliberative Democracy (D3) project and study human–AI interaction in civic participation. My projects include research infrastructure for AI-assisted consultation drafting and analysis of an online-deliberation experiment. I also develop human-in-the-loop evaluation tools for LLM-generated feedback on Python code.
Research themes
Legal NLP and retrieval. Studying how legal information is represented, retrieved and used by language models, including legal RAG, entity supervision and domain adaptation.
Efficient and reliable LLMs. Evaluating quantisation, inference and output reliability through controlled experiments, statistical analysis and deployment-relevant resource measurements.
Human–AI interaction. Building and evaluating systems for AI-assisted civic participation and educational feedback, with human annotation and behavioural evidence informing the evaluation.
Explore my research projects · Publications
Background and teaching
I tutor Python programming at UQ in CSSE7030: Introduction to Programming. I hold a Master of Software Engineering from the University of Tehran, where I ranked first in my cohort, and a Bachelor of Software Engineering from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Before my PhD, I worked in software development, and I bring that engineering experience to the research systems I build.