2026 candidate statement commit 2

Author: jjessyli

elections/2026/index.md

@@ -166,8 +166,18 @@ Together, these initiatives aim to make our review and evaluation processes more
 ### [Parisa Kordjamshidi](https://www.cse.msu.edu/~kordjams/)
 
 #### Bio
+Parisa Kordjamshidi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on reasoning in language and vision models, looking into this problem from various aspects of reasoning including spatial reasoning, compositional generalization, dealing with uncertainty while leveraging integration of symbolic and subsymbolic representations. She received her Ph.D. from KU Leuven and did a postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Amazon Faculty Research Award, and Fulbright Scholar Award, and her research team received the NAACL 2025 Outstanding Research Paper Award. She serves as an Associate Editor of JAIR, Co-Editor-in-Chief of ARR, and Action Editor for TACL, and has served on the organizing committee, area chair, and senior program committee of major conferences including AAAI, ACL, NAACL, EACL, EMNLP, ECML and more. During her sabbatical, she was an IVADO Visiting Scholar at Mila–Quebec AI Institute, a Visiting Associate Professor at UCLA in Fall 2025, and will be a Visiting Faculty Member at Bloomberg in Spring 2026.
 
 #### Candidacy Statement
+I would like to highlight the pressing issues in four main areas where major conferences such as NAACL can have significant and continued impact: 
+
+**I) Shaping Research Progress:** Major conferences such as NAACL can strengthen the scientific research  by promoting rigorous evaluation, validation, and reproducibility as central principles of research progress. Conference structures and peer-review processes should be designed to encourage diversity of topics, transparency, and open-source contributions, rather than benchmark-driven performance alone. This is the distinctive academic mission of advancing shared scientific understanding compared to industry-led developments. 
+
+**II) Real-world Application:** Encouraging application-oriented research is vital for translating technical innovation into societal benefit.  Such research needs to consider real-domain data and human evaluation, safety assurance, and ethical accountability to ensure responsible deployment in real-world contexts. Major conference such as NAACL can play a pivotal role in fostering interdisciplinary collaboration that identifies what works in practice, what does not, and why, thereby advancing trustworthy, and ethically grounded language comprehension and generation systems. 
+
+**III) NLP Democratization:** Ensuring equitable access to natural language research work, data, and resources is fundamental to inclusive innovation and global progress. NAACL can champion open and participatory frameworks that lower barriers to entry and empower diverse communities around the world to contribute to language intelligence development. It can also encourage investments that ensure NLP research benefits are broadly distributed rather than concentrated within a limited set of institutions or regions. 
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+**IV) NLP Education:** Expanding NLP literacy across the public, policymakers, and domain experts—who are not necessarily experts in this area—is essential for a realistic understanding of the functionality of the intelligent models and an informed use across all sectors. Specially, democratizing NLP without providing adequate education can introduce societal risks. NAACL can contribute to leading developing educational initiatives that foster a well-informed society capable of engaging critically and constructively with language intelligent models and computational linguisitcs. This will empower participation in shaping future of NLP rather than leaving uneducated voices to become barriers to progress. 
 
 
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