About me

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher, working with Jakub Dotlacil at Utrecht University.

I was a Postdoctoral Researcher 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.

Research Interests

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

Background

Postdoctoral Researcher in the Language, Logic and Information division at the Institute for Language Sciences, Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht University (2025-Now)

Postdoctoral Researcher in the NLP group at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University (2024)

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

• *NEW* Ece Takmaz, Albert Gatt, Jakub Dotlacil. Traces of Image Memorability in Vision Encoders: Activations, Attention Distributions and Autoencoder Losses. Accepted to the ICCV 2025 workshop MemVis: The 1st Workshop on Memory and Vision [LINK]

• *NEW* Ece Takmaz, Lisa Bylinina, Jakub Dotlacil. Model Merging to Maintain Language-Only Performance in Developmentally Plausible Multimodal Models. Accepted to EMNLP 2025 Workshop BabyLM [LINK]

• Anna Bavaresco, Raffaella Bernardi, Leonardo Bertolazzi, Desmond Elliott, Raquel Fernández, Albert Gatt, Esam Ghaleb, Mario Giulianelli, Michael Hanna, Alexander Koller, André F. T. Martins, Philipp Mondorf, Vera Neplenbroek, Sandro Pezzelle, Barbara Plank, David Schlangen, Alessandro Suglia, Aditya K Surikuchi, Ece Takmaz, Alberto Testoni. LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks. In Proceedings of ACL 2025. [LINK]

• Filippo Merlo, Ece Takmaz, Wenkai Chen, Albert Gatt. COOCO - Common Objects Out-of-Context - Semantic Violation in Scenes: Investigating Multimodal Context in Referential Communication. Preprint, 2025. [LINK]

• 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 and Guest Lectures

• Dec 2025 - Guest Lecture - VU Amsterdam Conversational AI bachelor’s course
• Nov 2025 - Invited Talk at the ILFC Seminar - Interactions between Formal and Computational Linguistics
• Nov 2025 - Invited Talk at the CLASP Seminar at University of Gothenburg
• Oct 2025 - Invited Talk at the ‘Commonsense AI deep dive’ meeting at VU Amsterdam
• Dec 2024 - Guest Lecture - VU Amsterdam Conversational AI bachelor’s course
• Oct 2024 - Talk at Cohere For AI Open Science Community Research Communications event
• Oct 2024 - Invited Talk at the 7th International Seminar on Language and Interdisciplinary Research on Language
• Sep 2024 - Keynote at the 2nd Workshop on Linguistic Insights from and for Multimodal Language Processing (LIMO2024 @ KONVENS)
• 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

Other interests

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