Short biography
I am a Reader in Computational Linguistics (an intermediate position between associate professor and professor) at
RGCL, University of Wolverhampton. I received my PhD at the Department of Computer Science, University of York as a member of the
Artificial Intelligence group and under
the supervision of Suresh Manandhar) in 2011. I was an assistant professor at Hacettepe University between 2015-2020 before moving to University of Wolverhampton.
I was also a visiting researcher in 2014 at the University of York, and in 2019 a visiting researcher at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics at Tokyo.
Research interests
I work on problems related to Natural Language Processing with the application of unsupervised learning techniques. These include statistical methods such as nonparametric Bayesian learning. In particular, I am interested in morphology, syntax, and semantics. I am also interested in deep learning techniques applied to language in order to learn representations of agglutinative languages.
Latest News
Our paper titled: "TurkishDelightNLP: A Neural Turkish NLP Toolkit" has been accepted to appear in NAACL 2022 Demo Track. (April, 2022)
Our paper titled: "Turkish Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation" has been accepted to appear in LREC 2022. (April, 2022)
- My project titled "Joint learning of morphology and syntax in Turkish" received TUBITAK Project Performance Award under grant 115E464. (January, 2022)
- We announce a new toolkit: Turkish Neural NLP Toolkit! (http://rgcl.wlv.ac.uk/TurkishNLP) (December, 2021)
- We're organising the 7th Representation Learning for NLP (Repl4NLP) along with ACL 2022!
- I gave a department seminar on 4th November 2020 at the Department of Computer Science, University of York. Title: Unsupervised Bayesian and Deep Learning Models of Morphology
Recent Professional Activities
The 7th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (Repl4NLP) at ACL 2022 - organising committee
Journal of Natural Language Engineering (JNLE) (Associate Editor)
Associate Editor on ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP)
Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (editorial board)
Full list of professional activities here.
Supervision
If you are interested in working with me as a MSc or PhD student and if you think that your interests match mine, please feel free to contact me.
Full list of supervised dissertations.
Teaching
I am teaching Machine Learning for NLP in the Spring term 2022.
Full list of past lectures.
Selected publications
Joint learning of morphology and syntax with cross-level contextual information flow.
Burcu Can, Hüseyin Aleçakır, Suresh Manandhar, Cem Bozşahin.
The Journal of Natural Language Engineering, Cambridge University Press. (in press)
Self Attended Stack Pointer Networks for Learning Long Term Dependencies.
Salih Tuç, Burcu Can.
The 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON 2020). 2020.
Characters or Morphemes: How to Represent Words?
Ahmet Üstün, Murathan Kurfalı, and Burcu Can.
3rd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP), ACL 2018, Melbourne, Australia. (Best Paper Award)
[pdf | code, data]
Full list of publications here.
Last modified: 5th December 2021
