Short biography
I am a Lecturer in Computing Science at the Department of Computing Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling in Scotland as a member of Data Science and Intelligent Systems Research Group. 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 where I worked between 2020-2022 as a Reader in Computational Linguistics.
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 EU grant for the BioAgora project has been funded to support the development of the Methodological Infrastructure of the Future Science Service for Biodiversity. (EUR 165K) (December 2025)
Our two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership has been funded to develop an AI-powered forensic accounting tool to forecast economic losses in commercial litigation. (£250K) (November, 2025)
- I gave a lecture on Introduction to Large Language Models at the Summer School in Deep Learning and LLMs in September, 2025.
- I gave a tutorial on Small Language Models at RANLP 2025 in September, 2025.
- I have been appointed Senior Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing. (July, 2024)
- Our paper titled: "Error Analysis of NLP Models and Non-Native Speakers of English Identifying Sarcasm in Reddit Comments
" has been accepted to appear in LREC-Coling 2024. (March, 2024)
- Our paper titled: "Forged-GAN-BERT: Authorship Attribution for LLM-Generated Forged Novels" has been accepted to appear in EACL 2024. (March, 2024)
- I gave a lecture on Large Language Models at Sabanci University Science Academy Machine Learning Summer School. (June, 2023)
- We organised the 8th Representation Learning for NLP (Repl4NLP) along with ACL 2023! (July, 2023)
- 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)
Recent Professional Activities
The 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (Repl4NLP) at ACL 2023 - organising committee
Journal of Natural Language Engineering (JNLE) (Associate Editor)
Senior Associate Editor on ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP)
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 Artificial Intelligence for Natural Language Processing and Programming and User Interface Design in Spring 2026.
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. 2022.
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: 27th August, 2024
