Research Focus

Founded in 2023, our Computational Linguistics Laboratory at Boğaziçi University focuses on natural language processing, deep learning, and computational social science. We develop advanced models and tools to analyze language, from historical texts to modern applications, bridging technology and linguistics.

News

• Dilara Zeynep Gürer has been awarded the Best Thesis Award at NAACL SRW 2025 for her groundbreaking thesis proposal titled "Text Extraction and Script Completion in Images of Arabic Script-Based Calligraphy". Congratulations to Dilara! You can access the paper here.
• Ece Elif Adak won first place in SMM4H-HeaRD 2025 Shared Task 3, successfully detecting dementia family caregivers on Twitter. Awesome work, Elif! You can access the paper here.
• Dilara Zeynep Gürer's paper, based on her thesis research, has been accepted to the NAACL 2025 Student Research Workshop! Congratulations, Dilara!
• Efe Eren Genç has been accepted into the MS program at Saarland University! Wishing you the best on this new journey, Efe!
• We’ve launched our Hugging Face page, featuring various models and resources for historical Turkish NLP. Check it out, and for more details, read the preprint version of our paper!

Academics

• Şaziye Betül Özateş Head of BUCOLIN LAB
• Ümit Atlamaz Co-Supervisor
• Ercan Atam Co-Supervisor

PhD Students

• Dilara Zeynep Gürer Advisors: Ümit Atlamaz, Şaziye Betül Özateş
• Nureddin Cüneyd Ünal Advisor: Şaziye Betül Özateş

Master's Students

• Ece Elif Adak Advisor: Şaziye Betül Özateş
• Tugay Balatlı Advisors: Ercan Atam, Şaziye Betül Özateş
• Necip Fazıl Ergün Advisor: Şaziye Betül Özateş
• Zeynep Karaman Advisors: Ercan Atam, Şaziye Betül Özateş
• Enes Köser Advisor: Şaziye Betül Özateş
• Elifnur Polat Advisors: Şaziye Betül Özateş, Ercan Atam
• Kevser Taştan Advisor: Şaziye Betül Özateş
• Şükrü Onur Yiğit Advisor: Şaziye Betül Özateş
• Zeynep Yıldız Advisor: Ercan Atam
• Berrak Dağlıoğlu (University of Stuttgart)

Bachelor's Students

• Tarık Emre Tıraş Dept. of Linguistics
• Ada Cengiz Dept. of Linguistics

High School Students

• Ece Yurtseven Robert College

Ongoing Projects

• Deep Learning-based Exploration of Linguistic Structures and Semantic Entities in Historical Turkish Texts
  (BAP, 2024-)
• Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models for Historical Language Understanding
  (2024 - )
• Development of a Deep Learning-Based Data Expansion Tool for Predicting the Efficacy of Antibacterial Nanoparticles Used in Nanomedicine
  (TÜBİTAK BİLGEM, 2024 - ) - with E. S. Turalı-Emre
• Automatic Processing and Analysis of Kazasker Ruznamçe Records with Digital Methods
  (TÜBİTAK 3005, 2024 - ) - with E. F. B. Taşdemir

Completed Projects

• Building Natural Language Processing Resources for Ottoman Turkish
  (2023 - 2025)
  • Şaziye Betül Özateş, Tarık Emre Tıraş, Ece Elif Adak, Berat Doğan, Fatih Burak Karagöz, Efe Eren Genç, and Esma F. Bilgin Taşdemir. 2025. Building Foundations for Natural Language Processing of Historical Turkish: Resources and Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.04828.
  • Şaziye Betül Özateş, Tarık Emre Tıraş, Efe Eren Genç, and Esma F. Bilgin Taşdemir. 2024. Dependency Annotation of Ottoman Turkish with Multilingual BERT. In Proceedings of The 18th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVIII), pages 188–196, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Fatih Burak Karagöz, Berat Doğan, and Şaziye Betül Özateş. 2024. Towards a Clean Text Corpus for Ottoman Turkish. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Turkic Languages (SIGTURK 2024), accepted. Association for Computational Linguistics.