Hi! I’m Tara, a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Michigan working with Danai Koutra. My research focuses on multimodal language + graph learning for problems in machine knowledge representation. I’m currently supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Google Women Techmakers scholarship.

⭐ I’m on the job market for industry NLP + ML research scientist and research engineer positions starting 2022!! ⭐ Please find my full-length academic CV and shorter technical resume, and reach out if you think I’d be a good fit!

Recent news

• October 2021: Giving an invited talk at the PKGs workshop at AKBC 2021. Thanks for the invite!
• September 2021: Two papers to appear at EMNLP 2021 on knowledge bases + language models (survey, negative commonsense)!
• August 2021: Happy to be joining Semantic Scholar at the Allen Institute for AI for a fall internship.
• May 2021: Excited to return to Microsoft Research for an internship.
• May 2021: Giving a keynote about personalized activity representations at the PHKG workshop, co-located with the Knowledge Graph Conference. Thank you to the organizers for the invitation!
• April 2021: Giving a talk about the CoDEx benchmark at the Connected Data London (CDL) 2021 meetup! Thanks to the organizers for the invitation.
• March 2021: I was awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship from the University of Michigan. Thank you Michigan!

Selected publications

Also see Google Scholar, my CV.

• Relational World Knowledge Representation in Contextual Language Models: A Review
  Tara Safavi, Danai Koutra
  EMNLP 2021 [PDF]

• NegatER: Unsupervised Discovery of Negatives in Commonsense Knowledge Bases
  Tara Safavi, Jing Zhu, Danai Koutra
  EMNLP 2021 [PDF]

• CoDEx: A Comprehensive Knowledge Graph Completion Benchmark
  Tara Safavi, Danai Koutra
  EMNLP 2020 [PDF] [GitHub]

• Evaluating the Calibration of Knowledge Graph Embeddings for Trustworthy Link Prediction
  Tara Safavi, Danai Koutra, Edgar Meij
  EMNLP 2020 [PDF]

• Toward Activity Discovery in the Personal Web
  Tara Safavi, Adam Fourney, Robert Sim, Marcin Juraszek, Shane Williams, Ned Friend, Danai Koutra, Paul N. Bennett
  WSDM 2020 [PDF] [blog post]

• Distribution of Node Embeddings as Multiresolution Features for Graphs
  Mark Heimann, Tara Safavi, Danai Koutra
  ICDM 2019 [PDF]
  Best student paper award

• REGAL: Representation Learning-based Graph Alignment
  Mark Heimann, Haoming Shen, Tara Safavi, Danai Koutra
  CIKM 2018 [PDF]

Misc

• My advice on applying for the NSF GRFP (updated periodically)
• Books I enjoyed recently:
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - narrated by Elijah Wood
  • A Promised Land by Barack Obama - narrated by the author
  • The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - narrated by Julian Rhind-Tutt
  • Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
  • Circe by Madeline Miller
  • The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
  • The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - Pevear and Volokhonsky English translation