About me

My name is Ahmet Üstün and I’m PhD Student in the Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG) at the University of Groningen. I’m working as a member of Computational Linguistics research group under the supervision of Arianna Bisazza, Gosse Bouma and Gertjan van Noord.

Research

My research focuses on multilingual natural language processing with a special interest of cross-lingual transfer learning. In this context, I worked on cross-lingual word embeddings, multilingual dependency parsing and multilingual unsupervised NMT. My reserarch aim is to find efficient multilingual adaptation methods for low-resource languages without suffering the curse of multilinguality. My other research interests include NLP methods for morphologically-rich languages and unsupervised learning of morphology.

Education

Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics, University of Groningen

M.S. in Cognitive Science, Middle East Technical University

B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Middle East Technical University

Selected Publications

Multilingual Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Denoising Adapters
Ahmet Üstün, Alexandre Berard, Laurent Besacier, Matthias Gallé
In EMNLP 2021 [pdf]

Massive Choice, Ample Tasks (MACHAMP): A Toolkit for Multi-task Learning in NLP
Rob van der Goot, Ahmet Üstün, Alan Ramponi, Ibrahim Sharaf, Barbara Plank
In EACL 2021 [outstanding paper award, demo track] [pdf] [website]

UDapter: Language Adaptation for Truly Universal Dependency Parsing
Ahmet Üstün, Arianna Bisazza, Gosse Bouma and Gertjan van Noord
In EMNLP 2020 [pdf] [code]

Characters or Morphemes: How to Represent Words?
Ahmet Üstün, Murathan Kurfalı, and Burcu Can
In 3rd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP, @ACL2018 [best paper award] [pdf] [code, data]

All Publications

Activities

2021

Sep Research visit at NAVER LABS Europe
Aug Our paper “Multilingual Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Denoising Adapter” is accepted to EMNLP 2021
Jul Our paper “On the Difficulty of Translating Free-Order Case-Marking Languages” is accepted to TACL
Jan-Jun Reseach internship at NAVER LABS Europe on using adapters for multilingual unsupervised NMT under supervision of Alexandre Bérard, Laurent Besacier and Matthias Gallé
Jun Published paper on zero-shot slot and intent detection with auxiliary tasks in NAACL 2021
Apr MACHAMP (A toolkit for multi-task learning in NLP) won best paper award in demo track at EACL 2021
Apr Published paper on effectiveness of dataset embeddings in AdaptNLP at EACL 2021

2020

Sep UDapter that introduces a multilingual parser with language adapters got accepted to EMNLP 2020
Jul Published journal paper on unsupervised learning of morphology in Natural Language Engineering
Jul Published paper on code-switched sentiment analysis for SemEval-2020 Task-9
Jun MACHAMP (A toolkit for multi-task learning in NLP) is on the Arxiv
Jan Presented at CLIN 30

2019

Dec Research visit (2 weeks) at Computer Science department of ITU Copenhagen
Nov Published paper on transfer learning for event detection at CLIC-it 2019
Sep Published paper on morphology aware cross-lingual word embeddings at RANLP 2019
Sep Presented at RANLP 2019
Aug Published paper at SIGMORPHON 2019 shared task (ACL 2019)
Aug Presented at SIGMORPHON 2019 (ACL 2019)
Jul Attended LxMLS 2019

2018

Nov Started PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Groningen
Jul Published paper [best paper] at RepL4NLP 2018 (ACL 2018)
Mar Presented at TextLink 2018 Final Action Conference

2017

Nov Research internship (2 Months) at ILCC at the University of Edinburgh
Sep Published M.S. Thesis on probabilistic learning of Turkish morphosemantics
Sep Awarded an entrepreneurship grant by the Technological Research Council of Turkey
Apr Published paper at CICLing 2017 on bayesian modelling of morphology
Apr Presented at CICLing 2017

2016

Oct Published paper on unsupervised morphological segmentation at SLSP 2017
Oct Presented at SLSP 2017
Apr Published paper on Turkish PoS tagging at CICLing 2016