Burcu Karagol-Ayan



Department of Computer Science

University of Maryland

College Park, MD 20742


The best way to contact me is via email.
burcu_AT_cs_dot_umd_dot_edu

About Me...

Here is my CV.

I just received my Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. I was a member language group of Language and Media Processing Laboratory (LAMP). During my graduate studies, I worked with David Doermann and Amy Weinberg.

My research interests are computational linguistics, specifically information extraction, resource generation, dictionaries, machine learning techniques in NLP, and morphology. I am also interested in cognitive science, computational biology, and human-computer interaction.

My thesis is about generating electronic resources from printed structured documents specifically for less commonly thought languages. I am especially concantrated on bilingual dictionaries, however, the BRIDGE (Bilingual Resource Inference and Dictionary Generation Environment) system our group developed and implemented is adaptable to other structured documents. My work concantrated on analyzing the lexical structure of the OCRed bilingual dictionaries and assigning tags to individual tokens in the dictionary entries, enhancing these first pass results using Transformation-based Learning, and generating the electronic resources that can be used in ways printed documents do not allow. I also worked on discovering morphemes of languages from limited, noisy data obtained in dictionary entries, specifically using headwords and example of usages. I proposed MIND (Morphology Induction from Noisy Data) that is based on the novel application of string searching algorithms to morphologically segment words and identify morphemes. MIND can successfully identify prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes, and infixes and is capable of identifying morphophonemic changes at the end of stems. Recently, I am working on unsupervised morpheme segmentation of words.

The courses I took in UMD includes Computer Graphics, Computer Networks, Introduction to Computational Linguistics, Computational Geometry, Data Structures, Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms, Computer Networks, Parallel and Distributed Data Intensive Computing, Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems, Machine Learning, Programming Techniques and Paradigms.

I graduated from

During my M.S. in METU, I was a member of Laboratory for the Computational Studies of Language (LCSL), and I worked with Cem Bozsahin.

Publications

  • Burcu Karagol-Ayan, David Doermann and Amy Weinberg. Morphology Induction from Limited Noisy Data Using Approximate String Matching. In Proceedings of the Eighth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology (SIGPHON 2006), pages 60-68, New York City, NY, June 2006. (BibTex) (pdf)

  • Burcu Karagol-Ayan, David Doermann and Amy Weinberg. Adaptive Transformation-based Learning for Improving Dictionary Tagging. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2006), pages 257-264, Trento, Italy, April 2006. (BibTex) (pdf)

  • Burcu Karagol-Ayan, David Doermann and Bonnie Dorr. Acquisition of Bilingual MT Lexicons from OCRed Dictionaries. In Proceedings of the Ninth Machine Translation Summit, pages 208-215, New Orleans, LA, September 2003. (BibTex) (pdf)

  • Huanfeng Ma, Burcu Karagol-Ayan, David Doermann, Doug Oard and Jianqiang Wang. Parsing and Tagging of Bilingual Dictionaries. TAL Traitement Automatique Des Langues, 44(2), pages 125-150, 2003. (BibTex)

  • Huanfeng Ma, Burcu Karagol-Ayan and David Doermann. Segmenting and Tagging Structured Content. Symposium on Document Image Understanding Technology, pages 53-64, April 2003. (BibTex) (pdf)

  • David S. Doermann, Huanfeng Ma, and Burcu Karagol-Ayan, Doug W. Oard. Lexicon Acquisition from Bilingual Dictionaries. SPIE Photonic West Electronic Imaging Conference, San Jose, CA, January 2002. (BibTex)

  • Burcu Karagol-Ayan. Morphosyntactic Generation of Turkish from Predicate-Argument Structure. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL '00), Hong Kong, October 2000. (BibTex) (pdf)

  • Burcu Karagol-Ayan. Generation of Turkish Surface Form from a Morphemic Lexicon. M.S. Thesis, Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, July 2000. (BibTex)

  • Burcu Karagol-Ayan. Morphosyntactic Generation of Turkish Surface Forms. In Proceedings of European Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI '99) Student Session, Utrecht, Netherlands, August 1999. (BibTex)

    • Personal

    This is me when I was 2 years old. I am quite angry about something here...

    I am married with Fazil, my college sweetheart. He is a research associate in UMIACS.

    We have a female cockatiel, Tatlim. She is around 3 years old. She laid eggs each year, but since the beginning of this year, she has been laying more than usual and she is continuously laying eggs since the beginning of june. I am really worried about her. We are not able to succeed discouraging her. New update: Tatlim went out to our balcony, and flew away. We weren't able to find her. We are very sorry and miss her a lot!

    I was born and raised in Kdz. Eregli, Turkey.

    I graduated from Ankara Fen Lisesi, AFL in short (Ankara Science High School). It was constructed in 1964, and the education is concantrated on mathematics and science. Every year only 96 students are admitted based on their success on a nation-wide examination.

    I enjoy traveling very much. Unfortunately I haven't been able to travel in Turkey as much as I'd like in the recent years. However I have been to a few countries and I visited some places in the US since we came here. I would like to write about my favorite places, some tips for future visitors when I have time. Pierre Flener, one of my professors in Bilkent University, has a nice homepage about traveling and Turkey as well.

    I love reading. When I have time and have a book I like, I can read all day long. It is really hard to list my favorite authors and books, since there are so many of them, but some of my favorite authors are Lousia May Alcott, Isabel Allende, Amy Tan, Jeffrey Archer, Isaac Asimov, Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Jack London, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J. K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy, and Jules Verne. I also enjoy biographies and history books.

    My another favorite hobby is going to movies and watching television. I especially like watching films, series, and documentaries.

    I am quite concerned about environmental issues. I do not want to leave a world that is more polluted and less inhabitable to our children. To be honest I am not doing much on this subject. My efforts are on the personal level, such as recycling, conversing energy at home, etc.. But this is the least everybody should do.

    Another interest of mine is photography. I especially like nature photography. I put some samples of pictures I took. I also like black & white photography and I participated in "Introduction to Darkroom" course in the Art and Learning Center at the University of Maryland. In 2002, I participated in a project with Greenbelt Museum titled "Greenbelt at 65". It is about documenting Greenbelt at the 65th anniversary of its construction with black and white images. I took pictures of Buddy Attick Park. We had an exhibition in the Greenbelt Community Center Gallery during June 2002. I have some samples of my b&w pictures. Except the ones from the exhibition, I took, developed, and printed all photographs in that page.

    Last Updated: September 17, 2007
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