ABOUT US

Istanbul Technical University Natural Language Processing Group is one of the oldest and biggest groups in Turkey dedicated on Turkish Natural Language Processing and its applications. The group has been established since 2000 and currently linked to the Language Technologies and Social Robotics Lab. of the ITU Faculty of Computer and Informatics Engineering. The group is led by Dr. Gülşen Eryiğit and actively consists of 3 professors, 3 research assistants, and many PhD and MS students as well as volunteer undergrads. The publications of the group members may be reached via Google Scholar Group Page Link.

The group mainly focuses in different aspects of Turkish related NLP tasks as well as their applications to different sectors such as telecom, banking and law. Some of the outstanding projects carried out by the participation of the group members are as follows:

  • Parsing Web 2.0 Sentences, TUBITAK, 2013-2015
  • A Signing Avatar System for Turkish to Turkish Sign Language Machine Translation, TUBITAK,2014-2016
  • Turkish Mobile Personal Assistant, Turkey's Ministry of Science Industry and Technology SANTEZ, 2013-2014
  • Dependency Analysis of Turkish, ITU - Scientific Research Projects, 2005-2007
  • Machine Translation between Turkish-English (2011-2013) and Turkish-Turkmen (2006-2009)

The group has strong relationships with the industry and participated in many industry related projects such as “Dialogue System for Automotive Support Channels”, “Dialogue System for Banking”, “Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis on Telecom Domain”, “Entity Detection and Relation Extraction on Noisy Texts (Banking)”, “Development of Semantic Analysis Components on Legal Documents using NLP”.

The group provides many language tools and resources to the researchers working in the field. Some of the basic NLP tools (such as text  normalization, morphological analysis etc…) are also provided as a web service via tools.nlp.itu.edu.tr. The important datasets (such as Turkish Treebanks, MWE and named entity resources, Turkish Sign Language resources etc …) which were produced and shared with the community may be found under the following link.

ITU NLP Group has been an active member of the UD (Universal Dependencies), CLARIN (Common language resources and technology infrastructure, EU 7th Framework), PARSEME (Parsing and Multiword Expressions, European Cost Action IC1207), and EnetCollect (European Network for Combining Language Learning with Crowdsourcing Techniques, European Cost Action CA16105) Projects.