Sina Elahimanesh

Sina Elahimanesh, Mohammadali Mohammadkhani, Shohreh Kasaei

In contemporary society, social media is deeply integrated into daily life, yet emotional expression often differs between real and online contexts. We studied the Persian community on X to explore this gap, designing a human-centered pipeline to measure alignment between real-world and social media emotions. Recent tweets and images of participants were collected and analyzed using Transformers-based text and image sentiment modules. Friends of participants provided insights into their real-world emotions, which were compared with online expressions using a distance criterion. The study involved N=105 participants, 393 friends, over 8,300 tweets, and 2,000 media images. Results showed only 28% similarity between images and real-world emotions, while tweets aligned about 76% with participants' real-life feelings. Statistical analyses confirmed significant disparities in sentiment proportions across images, tweets, and friends' perceptions, highlighting differences in emotional expression between online and offline environments and demonstrating practical utility of the proposed pipeline for understanding digital self-presentation.

Maryam Cheema, Sina Elahimanesh, Pooyan Fazli et al.

Advances in multimodal large language models enable automatic video narration and question answering (VQA), offering scalable alternatives to labor-intensive, human-authored audio descriptions (ADs) for blind and low vision (BLV) viewers. However, prior AI-driven AD systems rarely adapt to the diverse needs and preferences of BLV individuals across videos and are typically evaluated in controlled, single-session settings. We present ViDscribe, a web-based platform that integrates AI-generated ADs with six types of user customizations and a conversational VQA interface for YouTube videos. Through a longitudinal, in-the-wild study with eight BLV participants, we examine how users engage with customization and VQA features over time. Our results show sustained engagement with both features and that customized ADs improve effectiveness, enjoyment, and immersion compared to default ADs, highlighting the value of personalized, interactive video access for BLV users.

Sina Elahimanesh, Mohammadali Mohammadkhani, Sara Zahedi Movahed et al.

While large language models (LLMs) excel at open-ended dialogue, effective psychotherapy requires structured progression and adherence to clinical protocols, making the design of psychotherapist chatbots challenging. We investigate how different LLM-based designs shape perceived therapeutic dialogue in a chatbot grounded in the Self-Attachment Technique (SAT), a novel self-administered psychotherapy rooted in attachment theory. We compare three architectural variants: (1) a multi-agent system utilizing finite state machine aligned with therapeutic stages and a shared long-term memory, (2) a single-agent using identical knowledge-base and the same prompts, and (3) an unguided LLM. In an eight-day randomized controlled trial (RCT) with N=66 Farsi-speaking participants, balanced across the three chatbots, the multi-agent system is perceived as significantly more natural and human-like than the other variants and achieves higher ratings across most other metrics. These findings demonstrate that for therapeutic AI, architectural orchestration is as critical as prompt engineering in fostering natural, engaging dialogue.

Sina Elahimanesh, Shayan Salehi, Sara Zahedi Movahed et al.

In the wake of the post-pandemic era, marked by social isolation and surging rates of depression and anxiety, conversational agents based on digital psychotherapy can play an influential role compared to traditional therapy sessions. In this work, we develop a voice-capable chatbot in Farsi to guide users through Self-Attachment (SAT), a novel, self-administered, holistic psychological technique based on attachment theory. Our chatbot uses a dynamic array of rule-based and classification-based modules to comprehend user input throughout the conversation and navigates a dialogue flowchart accordingly, recommending appropriate SAT exercises that depend on the user's emotional and mental state. In particular, we collect a dataset of over 6,000 utterances and develop a novel sentiment-analysis module that classifies user sentiment into 12 classes, with accuracy above 92%. To keep the conversation novel and engaging, the chatbot's responses are retrieved from a large dataset of utterances created with the aid of Farsi GPT-2 and a reinforcement learning approach, thus requiring minimal human annotation. Our chatbot also offers a question-answering module, called SAT Teacher, to answer users' questions about the principles of Self-Attachment. Finally, we design a cross-platform application as the bot's user interface. We evaluate our platform in a ten-day human study with N=52 volunteers from the non-clinical population, who have had over 2,000 dialogues in total with the chatbot. The results indicate that the platform was engaging to most users (75%), 72% felt better after the interactions, and 74% were satisfied with the SAT Teacher's performance.

Mohammad Mahdi Abootorabi, Alireza Ghahramani Kure, Mohammadali Mohammadkhani et al.

This paper presents our system for SemEval-2025 Task 7: Multilingual and Crosslingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval. In an era where misinformation spreads rapidly, effective fact-checking is increasingly critical. We introduce TriAligner, a novel approach that leverages a dual-encoder architecture with contrastive learning and incorporates both native and English translations across different modalities. Our method effectively retrieves claims across multiple languages by learning the relative importance of different sources in alignment. To enhance robustness, we employ efficient data preprocessing and augmentation using large language models while incorporating hard negative sampling to improve representation learning. We evaluate our approach on monolingual and crosslingual benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements in retrieval accuracy and fact-checking performance over baselines.

Sina Elahimanesh, Mohammadali Mohammadkhani, Shohreh Kasaei

In contemporary society, widespread social media usage is evident in people's daily lives. Nevertheless, disparities in emotional expressions between the real world and online platforms can manifest. We comprehensively analyzed Persian community on X to explore this phenomenon. An innovative pipeline was designed to measure the similarity between emotions in the real world compared to social media. Accordingly, recent tweets and images of participants were gathered and analyzed using Transformers-based text and image sentiment analysis modules. Each participant's friends also provided insights into the their real-world emotions. A distance criterion was used to compare real-world feelings with virtual experiences. Our study encompassed N=105 participants, 393 friends who contributed their perspectives, over 8,300 collected tweets, and 2,000 media images. Results indicated a 28.67% similarity between images and real-world emotions, while tweets exhibited a 75.88% alignment with real-world feelings. Additionally, the statistical significance confirmed that the observed disparities in sentiment proportions.

Nader Zare, Mohsen Sadeghipour, Ashkan Keshavarzi et al.

Cyrus 2D Soccer Simulation was established 2012 with the aim of research and develop in multi agents systems. This year we have joined with Ziziphus for collaboration and speed up our researches. This paper express a brief description of a method for predicting player's behavior in a multi agent system using neural network with a dataset in three level (low, mid, high). The dataset was obtained from log files of past years RoboCup's matches. Behavior Prediction is used in block, mark and defensive decisions. The base code that Cyrus used is agent 3.11.