Our coordinator, Prof. Dr. Gülşen Eryiğit, has been listed in the "Career-Long Impact" category of the "World's Most Influential Scientists 2023" list, which is published annually by Elsevier in collaboration with Stanford University. This marks the first time a scientist from ITU's Artificial Intelligence and Data Engineering Department, one of the university's youngest departments, has made it onto Elsevier’s prestigious list of influential scientists.
Highlighting that all of the publications contributing to her inclusion on the list are related to Turkish natural language processing, Prof. Dr. Eryiğit said:
“Generative AI and large language models are currently the most critical topics in the field of AI, with all major AI companies worldwide conducting research in this area. Unfortunately, the majority of this research starts with languages like English and Chinese. In this context, the importance of work being done on the Turkish language in our country is immense.”
"Turkish is a beautiful example with its complex and rich word structure"
In computer science terminology, human languages are classified as "natural languages," distinct from programming languages. Natural language processing (NLP) studies focus on analyzing and interpreting speech and writing.
At ITU, NLP studies are particularly prominent in the following areas: automatic processing of financial documents, Turkish language learning, large Turkish language models, virtual assistants, crowdsourcing, the creation of Turkish language resources, and Turkish language processors. The goal of these studies in ITU's Artificial Intelligence and Data Engineering Department is to lead the development of technologies that will reduce external dependency in this field.
Prof. Dr. Eryiğit explained the global interest in Turkish NLP studies by saying, “Turkish, with its complex and rich word structure, serves as a beautiful example for all other languages with similar structures, and thanks to this, the studies initiated at ITU in this field are becoming a global reference.”
She also mentioned that when she decided to focus on Turkish NLP, it was not a particularly popular area of AI research, but she has been delighted by the intense scientific interest from around the world and by the contributions she and her team at the ITU Natural Language Processing Group have made to scientific literature.
Who is Prof. Dr. Gülşen Eryiğit?
Prof. Dr. Gülşen Eryiğit is the most cited researcher in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Turkey. She currently serves as a senior action editor at ACL RR (Association of Computational Linguistics), the global organization for NLP; the head of the Artificial Intelligence and Data Engineering Department at Istanbul Technical University; the coordinator of the ITU Natural Language Processing Group; and the director of ITU TÖMER.
Source: https://haberler.itu.edu.tr/haberdetay/2024/09/24/itu-dogal-dil-isleme-calismalarinda-lider