About me

I will be starting a new postdoc in March 2025, working with Jakub Dotlacil at Utrecht University.

I was a Postdoctoral Researcher for 8 months in the NLP research group at Utrecht University, working with Albert Gatt, and collaborating with Sina Zarrieß from the University of Bielefeld.

Previously, I was a PhD candidate at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). I was a member of the Dialogue Modelling Group supervised by Raquel Fernández and Sandro Pezzelle.

We organized a workshop that took place after my PhD defense, you can find the program here.

Research Interests

Natural Language Processing, Image Captioning, Multimodal Dialogue, Integration of Vision and Language, Eye-Tracking, Perception and Action

Education

PhD at Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam (2019-2024)

M.S. in Artificial Intelligence, University of Amsterdam (2017-2019)

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

B.S. in Computer Engineering, Bilkent University

Publications

• Ece Takmaz. Visual and Linguistic Processes in Deep Neural Networks: A Cognitive Perspective. PhD Thesis. Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2024. [LINK]

• Hanna-Sophia Widhoelzl, Ece Takmaz. Decoding Emotions in Abstract Art: Cognitive Plausibility of CLIP in Recognizing Color-Emotion Associations. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2024. [LINK]

• Ece Takmaz, Sandro Pezzelle, and Raquel Fernández. Describing Images Fast and Slow: Quantifying and Predicting the Variation in Human Signals during Visuo-Linguistic Processes. In Proceedings of EACL 2024. [LINK]

• Ece Takmaz*, Nicolo’ Brandizzi*, Mario Giulianelli, Sandro Pezzelle, and Raquel Fernández. Speaking the Language of Your Listener: Audience-Aware Adaptation via Plug-and-Play Theory of Mind. In Findings of ACL 2023. [LINK] (* Shared first authorship)

• Ece Takmaz. Team DMG at CMCL 2022 Shared Task: Transformer Adapters for the Multi- and Cross-Lingual Prediction of Human Reading Behavior. In Proceedings of the ACL 2022 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL). [LINK] *Best Shared Task Paper Award*

• Ece Takmaz, Sandro Pezzelle, and Raquel Fernández. Less Descriptive yet Discriminative: Quantifying the Properties of Multimodal Referring Utterances via CLIP. In Proceedings of the ACL 2022 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL). [LINK]

• Sandro Pezzelle, Ece Takmaz, and Raquel Fernández. Word Representation Learning in Multimodal Pre-Trained Transformers: An Intrinsic Evaluation. TACL [LINK]

• Gökhan Gönül, Ece Takmaz, and Annette Hohenberger. Preschool children’s use of perceptual-motor knowledge and hierarchical representational skills for tool making. Acta Psychologica 2021. [LINK]

• Ece Takmaz, Sandro Pezzelle, Lisa Beinborn, and Raquel Fernández. Generating Image Descriptions via Sequential Cross-Modal Alignment Guided by Human Gaze. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2020. [LINK]

• Ece Takmaz, Mario Giulianelli, Sandro Pezzelle, Arabella Sinclair and Raquel Fernández. Refer, Reuse, Reduce: Generating Subsequent References in Visual and Conversational Contexts. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2020. [LINK]

• Janosch Haber, Tim Baumgärtner, Ece Takmaz, Lieke Gelderloos, Elia Bruni, and Raquel Fernández. The PhotoBook Dataset: Building Common Ground through Visually Grounded Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2019. [LINK]

• Ravi Shekhar, Ece Takmaz, Raquel Fernández, and Raffaella Bernardi. Evaluating the Representational Hub of Language and Vision Models. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS), 2019. [LINK]

• Gökhan Gönül, Ece Kamer Takmaz, Annette Hohenberger, and Michael Corballis. The cognitive ontogeny of tool making in children: The role of inhibition and hierarchical structuring. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Volume 173, 222-238, May 2018. [LINK]
  
  

Invited Talks

• Jun 2024 - Talk at NLG in the Lowlands Workshop
• Jun 2024 - Talk at Workshop on NLP and Multi-Modality
• Sep 2023 - Talk at Search Engines Amsterdam: IR@AMS
• Oct 2021 - NLPhD talk, Department of Language Science and Technology - Saarland University
• Sep 2021 - Lecture on eye-tracking in multimodal NLP for the Cognitive Science 3 course - University of Copenhagen
• Mar 2021 - KUIS AI Talks - Koç University - YouTube

Posters

• July 2022 - Ece Takmaz, Sandro Pezzelle, and Raquel Fernández. Time Alignment between Gaze and Speech in Image Descriptions: Exploring Theories of Linearization. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

• May 2020 - Takmaz, E., Pezzelle, S., Beinborn, L. and Fernández, R. Enhancing Image Captioning with Eye-Tracking. GeCKo symposium: Integrating Generic and Contextual Knowledge

• Oct 2019 - Takmaz, E., Beinborn, L., Pezzelle, S. and Fernández, R. Enhancing Image Captioning with Eye-Tracking. EurNLP. London, United Kingdom

• Aug 2019 - Takmaz, E., Beinborn, L., Pezzelle, S. and Fernández, R. Enhancing Image Captioning with Eye-Tracking. Interacting Minds Summer School in Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands

• Sep 2018 - Shekhar, R., Takmaz, E., Kondylidis, N., Greco, C., Venkatesh, A., Bernardi, R. and Fernández, R. Learning to see from experience: But which experience is more propaedeutic? European Conference on Computer Vision, Workshop on Shortcomings in Vision and Language, Munich, Germany

• Aug 2017 - Gonul, G., Takmaz, E.K., Corballis, M. and Hohenberger A. Perceptual/motor and representational factors in tool innovation in children. 25th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP) Hertfordshire, UK

• Apr 2017 - Takmaz, E.K., Akbas, E. and Zeyrek, D. Turkish Language Models Utilizing Character- vs. Syllable-Based Recurrent Neural Networks. 4th International Symposium on Brain and Cognitive Science, Ankara, Turkey

• Jul 2016 - Gonul, G., Hohenberger A. and Takmaz, E.K. Tool innovation in 5-6-year-old Turkish pre-school children: The effect of familiarity and salience of affordances. 24th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, Vilnius, Lithuania

• Apr 2014 - Takmaz, E.K. and Bozsahin, C. A Computational Study on Learning Theories andthe Role of Planning in Maze-Learning Environments. 1st International Symposiumon Brain and Cognitive Science, Istanbul, Turkey
  
  

Organisational

• Member of the EACL Student Board - since March 2020

• EACL Student Research Workshop Co-Chair - since March 2020

• Member of the ILLC PhD Council - since December 2019

• Mentor in ‘Women in the Faculty of Science - Student Chapter’ (WiF Students) at the University of Amsterdam

• Member of the 2022 Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics CMCL workshop Program Committee

• Member of the NeurIPS 2021 workshop CtrlGen Program Committee (Controllable Generative Modeling in Language and Vision)

• Member of the ALVR Program Committee (2nd Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research in conjunction with NAACL 2021)

• Member of the Web Summer School for Logic, Language, and Information (WeSSLLI) 2020 Virtual Student Session Program Committee

• Live microblogger on Twitter for ACL 2020 tweeting in Turkish and English for the track ‘Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond’
  
  

Other interests

I like going to concerts, taking photos, learning languages and playing the guitar (instagram), (youtube).