Alafate Abulimiti
I am a researcher and engineer based in Paris, interested in how people and intelligent systems communicate, reason, and collaborate. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at ISIR / Sorbonne University, working on human-agent collaboration and socially intelligent dialogue systems. I received my PhD from INRIA and ENS-PSL in December 2023.
My work spans conversational AI, natural language generation, dialogue reasoning, and the social and cognitive sciences. Alongside research, I enjoy building practical software and open-source tools; you can find a selection on my repositories page. Before my PhD, I studied dialogue and semantics at Université de Paris, and completed an engineering degree in computer science and a master’s degree in data science at Université de Tours. Outside work, I enjoy chess ♟️, reading, writing, meditation, and CrossFit.
news
| Jul 27, 2026 | Our paper, “A Reinforcement Learning-Based Facilitator for Simulated Group Motivational Interviewing,” is now published in the SIGDIAL 2026 proceedings, with code available on GitHub. Co-authored with Vladislav Maraev, Agnès Helme-Guizon, and Catherine Pelachaud. |
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| Jun 01, 2025 | I am the one of the organizers at the workshop DEBP-PVA in IVA 2025, Join us! 🥂🥂🥂, check this out! |
| Jan 01, 2025 | After a wonderful journey in L’Oreal, I am back in Academia, working as a postdoc at ISIR/UPMC with Catherine Pelachaud & Agnès HELME-GUIZON within the program PEPR eNSEMBLE! |
| Jun 01, 2024 | I joined L’Oreal as a AI Engineer/Data Scientist! |
| Dec 14, 2023 | I have successfully completed my thesis defense! 👨🏻🎓 |
| Jul 01, 2023 | My paper: “When to generate hedges in peer-tutoring interactions?” is accepted in SIGDIAL 2023 as the main conference paper 🎊, co-authored with Prof. Chloé Clavel and Prof. Justine Cassell. |
| May 01, 2023 | My paper: “How About Kind of Generating Hedges using End-to-End Neural Models?” is accepted in ACL 2023 as the main conference paper 🎊 (I received the notification the same day as my birthday!), co-authored with Prof. Chloé Clavel and Prof. Justine Cassell. |
| Jun 01, 2021 | My paper – By the way, do you like Spider Man?” — A Social Planning Model towards Rapport – is accepted in SemDial 2021 🎊, co-authored with Prof. Justine Cassell and Prof. Jonathan Ginzburg. |
| Oct 01, 2020 | I joined the INRIA and ENS/PSL as a Ph.D. student, under the supervision of Prof. Justine Cassell, Prof. Chloé Clavel and Prof. Jonathan Ginzburg (first year supervision). |