Senior Scientist Conversational Understanding Sciences

I am Sr. Scientist in Conversational Understanding Science Team @ Microsoft in Silicon Valley Campus since 2010. Previously I was a Postdoc Reseacher at the EECS Departmant of the University of California, Berkeley between 2008-2010. I received my Ph.D. from at University of Toronto, Canada in 2008.

In my research, I focus on cool stuff relating to language and speech. My research topics include topics relating to natural language understanding (namely spoken language understanding, natrual language processing, human to machine dialog modeling) and machine learning (structured prediction, unsupervised learning and Bayesian methods). I associate myself with conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, NIPS. I am also member of the Berkeley Soft Computing lab.

Publications and Invited talks

2013

Semi-Supervised Semantic Tagging for Conversational Understanding Using Markov Topic Regression. Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gokhan Tur, Ruhi Sarikaya, ACL 2013, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013, Accepted.

Learning to Relate Literal and Sentimental Descriptions of Visual Properties. Mark Yatskar, Svitlana Volkova, Asli Celikyilmaz, Bill Dolan, Luke Zettlemoyer, NAACL-HLT-2013, Atlanta, USA, June 2013, Accepted.

Easy Contextual Intent Prediction and Slot Detection. Aditya Bhargava, Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Ruhi Sarikaya., ICASSP-2013, Vancouver, Canada, May 2013, Accepted

Latent Semantic Modeling for Slot Filling in Conversational Understanding. Gokhan Tur, Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, ICASSP-2013, Vancouver, Canada, May 2013, Accepted.

Weakly Supervised Approach for Building Conversational Interaction System, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Asli Celikyilmaz, Gokhan Tur, Larry Heck. MSR Machine Learning Summitt-2013, Demo Track, April 22-24, 2013, Paris, France.

2012

A Joint Model for Discovery of Aspects in Utterances. Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tür. 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL-2012, Jeju, South Korea, June, 2012. (the acceptance rate: 19%)

Mining Search Query Logs for Spoken Language Understanding. Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gokhan Tur, Asli Celikyilmaz, North Ameircan Association for Computational Linguistics NAACL-2012 : Workshop on Future Directions and Needs in the Spoken Dialog Community: Tools and Data. Montreal, Canada, 2012.

A Discriminative Classification-Based Approach to Information State Updates for a Multi-Domain Dialog System, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tür, Larry Heck, Ashley Fidler, Asli Celikyilmaz. In the Proceedings of the Interspeech 2012, Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Portland, OR, September, 2012.

Statistical Semantic Interpretation Modeling for Spoken Language Understanding with Enriched Semantic Features, Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tür, IEEE SLT-2012 - IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies, Miami, FL, 2012. 

An Overview of Speech and Related Papers @ ACL 2012, Asli Celikyilmaz. In the Proceedings of IEEE SLT Newsletter, 2012.

Natural Languge Understanding, Invited talk at the Machine Learning Summer School (MLSC 2012) at University of California, Santa Cruz - July 9-20, 2012.

Discovery of Topically Coherent Sentences for Extractive Summarization. Asli Celikyilmaz, and Dilek Hakkani-Tür. ACL 2011 - The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Portland, Oregon. June 2011. (the acceptance rate: 26%)

Leveraging Web Query Logs to Learn User Intent Via Bayesian Latent Variable Model. Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, and Gokhan Tur. ICML 2011 - Workshop on Combining Learning Strategies to Reduce Label Cost. Bellevue, Washington. July, 2011.

Exploiting Distance Based Similarity in Topic Models for User Intent Detection. Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Ashley Fidler, Dustin Hillard. ASRU-2011 - 12th biannual IEEE workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, Waikoloa, HI, December, 2011.

Employing Web Search Query Click Logs for Multi-Domain Spoken Language Understanding. Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Larry Heck, Asli Celikyilmaz, Ashley Fidler, Dustin Hillard, Rukmini Iyer, S. Parthasarathy.ASRU-2011 - 12th biannual IEEE workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, Waikoloa, HI, December, 2011.

Multi-Domain Spoken Language Understanding with Approximate Inference.Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, and Gokhan Tur. Interspeech'11 - Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association , Florence, Italy, August, 2011.

Learning Weighted Entity Lists from Web Click Logs for Spoken Language Understanding. Dustin Hillard, Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, and Gokhan Tur. Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech'11), Florence, Italy, August, 2011.

Towards Unsupervised Spoken Language Understanding: Exploiting Query Click Logs for Slot Filling. Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Dustin Hillard, and Asli Celikyilmaz.Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech'11), Florence, Italy, August, 2011.

Concept-based classification for multi-document summarization. Asli Celikyilmaz and Dilek Hakkani-Tür. ICASSP 2011 - IEEE Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Prague, Czech Republic, May 2011.

The Actor-Topic Model for Extracting Social Networks in Literary Narrative. Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Hua He, Grzegorz Kondrak, Denilson Barbosa, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2010) in Machine Learning for Social Computing Workshop, Vancouver & Whistler, Canada.

A Hybrid Hierarchical Model for Multi-Document Summarization. Asli Celikyilmaz and Dilek Hakkani-Tür. ACL 2010 - The 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Uppsala, Sweden, July, 2010. (the acceptance rate: 25%)

LDA Based Similarity Modeling for Question Answering. Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, and Gokhan Tur. NAACL-HLT 2010. Workshop on Semantic Search, Los Angeles, CA, June 2010.

A Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Learning for Question Semantic Labeling. Asli Celikyilmaz and Dilek Hakkani-Tür. NAACL-HLT 2010, Workshop on Semantic Search, Los Angeles, CA, June 2010. Semantic Question Answering System with Topic ModelsAsli Celikyilmaz NIPS 2010 - Workshop on Applications of Topic Models : Text and Beyond

Probabilistic Model-Based Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Messages Asli Celikyilmaz, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, and Junlan Feng. SLT-2010 - IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies, Berkeley, CA, December 2010.

Information Extraction From Text - Dealing With Imprecise Data Asli Celikyilmaz & I. Burhan Turksen Fuzzy Systems by INTECH 2010 - Book Chapter

Learning Semantic Similarity with Soft Computing Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen Information Sciences 2010 Decision Making With Imprecise ParametersAsli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (IJAR) Invited Paper, 2010.

A Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning for Question-Answering Asli Celikyilmaz and Marcus Thint and Zhiheng Huang ACL 2009 - Association for Computational Linguistics. (the acceptance rate: 21%)

Soft-Link Spectral Clustering for Information Extraction Asli Celikyilmaz IEEE-ICSC 2009 - Third IEEE Int. Conf. on Semantic Computing Winner of Best Paper Award

Investigation of Question Classifier in Question Answering Zhiheng Huang and Marcus Thint and Asli Celikyilmaz EMNLP 2009 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. (the acceptance rate: 34%)

Effectively Exploiting WordNet in Semantic Class Classification for Coreference Resolution.Zhiheng Huang and Guangping Zeng, W. Xu and Asli Celikyilmaz EMNLP 2009 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. (the acceptance rate: 34%)

Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Learning for Learning Semantic Relations from Text Asli Celikyilmaz WIML 2009 @ NIPS 2009 - Woman in Machine Learning Workshop.

Spectral Learning with Type-2 Fuzzy Numbers for Question/Answering System Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen IFSA 2009- World Congress EUSFLAT Conference 2009

Kernel Based Hybrid Fuzzy Clustering for Non-Linear Fuzzy Classifiers Asli Celikyilmaz and I.Burhan Turksen NAFIPS 2009 - Int. Conf. of North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society.

Modeling Uncertainty with Fuzzy Logic: With Recent Theory and ApplicationsAsli Celikyimaz and I. Burhan Turksen. Springer Book 2009.

A Soft Link Spectral Model for Link PredictionAsli CelikyilmazInternational Journal of Semantic Computing 3:4 2009

Increasing Accuracy of Two Class Pattern Recognition with Improved Fuzzy FunctionsAsli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan TurksenExpert Systems with Applications, 36, 2009.

Genetic Fuzzy System Based on Improved Fuzzy Functions Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan TurksenJournal of Computers 4:2 2009

Semantic Approach to Textual Entailment for Question Answering Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan TurksenICCI 2008 - IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics.

Analysis of Interim Fuzzy Functions, Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen, IMS2008 - 6^th Int. Symposium of Intelligent and Manufacturing Systems.

Type-2 Fuzzy Classifier Ensembles for Text Entailment Asli Celikyilmaz and I.Burhan Turksen JCIS 2008 - Joint Conference on Information Sciences.

Uncertainty Bounds of Fuzzy C-Regression Method Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen WCCI 2008 - IEEE Int. Conference on Fuzzy Systems-World Congress on Computational Intelligence.

Genetic Type-2 Fuzzy Classifier Functions Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen NAFIPS 2008 - Int. Conf. of North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society.

A Type-2 Fuzzy C-regression Method Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen IPMU 2008 - Int. Conf. on Inform. Process. and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems.

Uncertainty modeling with evolutionary improved fuzzy functions approach Uncertainty Modeling with Evolutionary Improved Fuzzy Functions Approach Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics- Part B 38:4 2008

Enhanced Fuzzy System Models with Improved Fuzzy Clustering Algorithm Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems 16:3 2008

Validation Criteria for Enhanced Fuzzy Clustering Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen Pattern Recognition Letters 29 2008

A New Classifier Design with Fuzzy Functions Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen RSKT 2007 - International Conference on Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology.

Evolution of Fuzzy System Models: An Overview and New Directions Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen RSKT 2007 - International Conference on Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology.

Type 2 Fuzzy System Models with Improved Fuzzy Functions Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen NAFIPS 2007 - Int. Conf. of North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society. Winner of Best Student Paper Award.

Evolutionary Fuzzy System Models with Improved Fuzzy Functions and Its Application to Industrial Process Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen IEEE-SMC 2007 - IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, Cybernetics.

Improved Interval Valued Fuzzy Reasoning with Evolutionary Computing Asli Celikyilmaz & I. Burhan Turksen JCIS 2007 - International Conference on Fuzzy Theory & Technology.

A New Cluster Validity Index with Fuzzy Functions Asli Celikyilmaz & I. Burhan Turksen. IFSA 2007- World Congress EUSFLAT Conference.

Fuzzy Functions with Support Vector Machines Asli Celikyilmaz and I. Burhan Turksen Information Sciences 177 2007

Comparison of Fuzzy Functions with Fuzzy Rule Bases Asli Celikyilmaz & I. Burhan Turksen International Journal of Fuzzy Systems 8:3 2006.

Microsoft Conversational Understanding Sciences

Mountain View, CA 94041 Microsoft Silicon Valley

asli@ieee.org / asli.ca@live.com

Recent News...

• Presenting a demo at the Microsoft Research Machine Learning Summit April 2013, Paris, France.
• Looking for smart and enthusiastic research interns (PhD level). Please e-mail me if you are interested.