Contact Page

About Me

Greetings! My name is Ali Jahanshiri. I was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1982. By the age of fifteen, I had learned about eight languages on my own, without anyone’s help and with the least resources one can come by in a country like Iran. Classes for languages other than English were scarce, uncommon or not affordable to many. Sometimes, even self-study courses were not available.

I’m acquainted with over twenty languages and have explored different areas of linguistics at Ph.D. level by self-studying. My formal education consists of a Master’s degree in software engineering. Artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, in particular, is the field where my interests in human languages and application development coalesce.

My site has been up for many years. In 2004, I developed the first free, downloadable Persian verb conjugator. Quoting an American professor on this:

In those days, Iran was even more insular than now and the idea that some young kid would go out and make some useful tool and then share it with the global community was ahead of its time in anyone’s book.