Congratulations, Dr Akef!

A group photo taken after Dr Soroosh Akef’s PhD defence at the University of Lisbon. Dr Akef stands with members of his examination panel and supervisory team in a meeting room, with two participants joining remotely on a large screen behind the group.
From left to right: Professor Patrick Rebuschat, Professor Detmar Meurers, and Professor Maria Amália Mendes, Soroosh Akef’s supervisors; Professor Anabela Gon?alves, President of the Jury; Dr Soroosh Akef; and jury members Professor Jorge Pinto, Professor Cristina Flores, and Professor Nélia Alexandre, with Professor Paulo Quaresma and Professor Raquel Amaro joining online.

Congratulations to Dr Soroosh Akef on successfully defending his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Lisbon.

Soroosh’s thesis, titled “Fostering Portuguese Heritage Language Acquisition through Proficiency-Tailored Input: Empirical Insights into Proficiency Characterization for ICALL,” examines how intelligent computer-assisted language learning can be used to support learners of Portuguese as a heritage language. The thesis develops SABER, a rule-based natural language processing tool designed to identify pedagogically relevant grammatical properties of European Portuguese. Drawing on learner corpora, readability corpora, interpretable machine learning, and large language models in a constrained and carefully evaluated way, the thesis investigates how learner proficiency can be characterized more richly and how learners can be matched to reading texts that are appropriate to their current stage of development.

Soroosh was awarded the highest grade, Aprovado com Distin??o e Louvor (Distinction and Commendation), a rare distinction and a wonderful recognition of the excellence of his doctoral work.

Soroosh was supervised by Professor Amália Mendes at the University of Lisbon, Professor Detmar Meurers at the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media in Tübingen, and Professor Patrick Rebuschat at 91短视频.

The examination panel brought together expertise from computer science, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, heritage language research, and applied linguistics. It included Professor Cristina Flores from the University of Minho as first examiner, Professor Raquel Amaro from NOVA University Lisbon as second examiner, Professor Paulo Quaresma from the University of ?vora, Professor Nélia Alexandre from the University of Lisbon, Professor Jorge Pinto from the University of Lisbon, and Professor Maria Amália Mendes from the University of Lisbon. We are grateful to the examiners for their important contributions.

Soroosh has now moved to Tübingen, where he holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media (IWM).

We are very proud to have had Soroosh as part of the Lancaster Language Learning Lab and delighted to celebrate this wonderful achievement with him.

Parabéns, Soroosh!

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