CV
Experience
Postdoctoral Researcher & Lecturer · September 2022 – August 2026
Computational Linguistics Group, University of Potsdam, Germany
LLM post-training and evaluation, multi-turn agents, code generation, multimodal models. Led the clembench and Playpen open-source systems. Taught two courses per semester and supervised doctoral, MSc and BSc projects.
Postdoctoral Researcher · September 2019 – August 2022
Visual Analytics Group — TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, and L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany
Multimodal deep learning, vision–language models, video understanding and large-scale retrieval, within the CLEOPATRA ITN and FakeNarratives projects, supervised doctoral projects.
Data Scientist · July 2016 – May 2019
Mercury.ai, Bielefeld, Germany
Production NLP for a commercial multilingual conversational AI platform: intent classification, entity extraction and multilingual routing, with the backend services around it.
Research Associate · November 2013 – December 2018
Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC), Bielefeld University, Germany
Statistical and neural NLP: semantic parsing, structured prediction, and multilingual question answering over knowledge graphs.
Education
PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) in Computer Science · 2013 – 2018
Bielefeld University, Germany — grade magna cum laude, full scholarship
Thesis: Learning Multilingual Semantic Parsers for Question Answering over Linked Data. A comparison of neural and probabilistic graphical model architectures. Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Philipp Cimiano.
MSc in Computer Science · 2011 – 2013
TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey — full scholarship
Thesis: Named Entity Disambiguation using Linked Open Data. Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Erdogan Dogdu.
BSc in Computer Science · 2005 – 2010
TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey — full scholarship
Open source
- clembench — benchmark harness running 100+ models through goal-directed, multi-turn tasks & recently with multilingual with a continuously updated public leaderboard
- Playpen — training environment for learning from dialogue-game interaction (SFT, DPO, multi-turn RL)
- TurkicNLP — toolkit and resources for 20+ Turkic languages
Also
Publications — 50+ peer-reviewed papers; see the full list, Google Scholar or DBLP.
Service — organiser of multiple international workshops and shared tasks; reviewer and programme committee member for ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, COLING, ACM MM and ICMR. Details.
Teaching — course list, University of Potsdam and Bielefeld University.
Languages — Turkmen (native), English, Russian, Turkish and Uzbek (fluent), German (C1), Spanish (A2).