About me

I am 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.

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

M.S. in Artificial Intelligence, University of Amsterdam

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).