About Me
I’m a Computer Science PhD candidate studying how machines understand language, narratives, and meaning.
My work spans natural language processing, multimodal systems, and representation learning. I’m particularly drawn to problems where structure matters: aligning sequences, modeling latent signals, understanding robustness, and designing systems that behave reliably under distribution shifts. I enjoy thinking about the mechanics behind learning systems - how objectives shape behavior, how representations encode bias, and how small modeling decisions scale into large effects.
Research Interests
My current research explores opinionated and persuasive language in news. I also study propaganda detection and how people perceive trustworthiness across news sources.
I am especially interested in machine learning and large language models, with emphasis on robust domain adaptation for practical NLP systems.
Experience
Since March 2026
Truveta - Machine Learning Engineer
Summer 2025
Truveta - Machine Learning Engineer Intern
Summer 2022
Proof Trading - Data Scientist Intern
Selected Projects
- Detecting Subjective Language in News
- Zero-shot Stance Detection in News and Social Media
- Sensitive Narrative Analysis: Common Patterns in Domestic Violence Stories
Publications
M Shokri, AC Salem, G Levine, J Devaney, SI Levitan
arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.02192 (2025)
AC Salem, M Shokri, J Devaney
arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.08755 (2025)
M Shokri, SI Levitan, R Levitan
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (2025)
V Sharma, MM Shokri, SI Levitan, E Filatova, S Jain
arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.08169 (2025)
V Sharma, MM Shokri, S Jain, SI Levitan, E Filatova
Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference (2025)
M Shokri, E Klapper, J Shan, SI Levitan
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Narrative Understanding (2025)
M Shokri, A Bishop, SI Levitan
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding (2024)
M Shokri, V Sharma, E Filatova, S Jain, S Levitan
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (2024)
A Americo, A Bishop, P Cesaretti, G Grogan, A McKoy, RN Moss, L Oakley, et al.
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (2024)
M Shokri, SI Levitan
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Argument Mining (2023)
Full list on Google Scholar.
Teaching
Fall 2026: Natural Language Processing at Hunter College, City University of New York
Interests
Outside research, I enjoy books, films and shows, tennis, football, podcasts, and traveling.