Dr. Ahmet Aker
e-mail:
Professional profile
I am a researcher in the Sheffield NLP group. For the past 6 years I have been playing a major role in several EU funded projects, where I have mainly been responsible for the design, implementation and evaluation of software meeting project research objectives, writing and co-ordinating project deliverables and scientific papers, and presenting research results at technical meetings and international conferences. My research interests are in automatic text summarization, information extraction, machine learning, statistical machine translation, comparable data acquisition from the web, term alignment and automatic POS tag projection. I have published over 24 papers on these topics. My background is software engineering. I have more than 2 years experience working as a software developer in the industry. In addition, I developed several software solutions for industry and research on a freelance basis. I am holding a German Diplom in Computer Science, a Masters degree in Advanced Software Engineering and a PhD in Natural Language Processing. I was the best Masters student in our department and was also awarded with a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) during my Computer Science studies in Germany.
Higher education and qualifications
University of Sheffield
PhD in Computer Science (10/2007—10/2013)
Topic: Entity Type Modeling for Multi-Document Summarization: Generating Descriptive Summaries of Geo-Located Entities
Supervisor: Prof. Robert Gaizauskas
University of Sheffield
MSc(Eng) in Computer Science (09/2006-09/2007)
Specialisation: Advanced Software Engineering
Achieved the best Master Degree. Results of my Master Thesis appeared in the Eclipse Magazine (01/2009).
University of Dortmund
German Diploma in Computer Science
minor: Electrical Engineering (10/2000-05/2005)
During these studies I was awarded a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) awarded to 1% of all university students in Germany.
Work Experience
Since 2010 I have been employed as a full-time Research Associate at the University of Sheffield. In this role I have been working on four externally funded projects: TNA, ACCURAT, TaaS and ViSen. Within these projects I played an important role in meeting the project requirements including developing research directions, software development, designing and conducting experiments, writing and co-ordinating project deliverables and scientific papers and presenting research results at technical meetings and international conferences. Furthermore, I was the main contact for the Sheffield team and was actively liaising with project partners, as well as representing the University of Sheffield at various project meetings. My work also included training new colleagues, assigning them tasks and coordinating the research process and publications. For the TaaS and ViSen projects I substantially contributed to writing the project proposals. My publication list includes several papers at prestigious conferences which cover the topics of these projects. For my work I have been awarded an exceptional contributions award by the University of Sheffield, based on exceeding the project objectives in four subsequent years. I also worked within the TRIPOD project which funded my PhD. Within this project I was part-time research associate. My research within the PhD is closely related to the aims of TRIPOD. Apart from these I have worked for 2 years as software developer at various companies. The details of the projects are listed below.
University of Sheffield, full-time Research Associate in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group, Department of Computer Science (01/2013-present):
Project: ViSen project
The project aims to perform image captioning from scratch. This includes image analysis, object/scene recognition and natural language caption generation.
Principle Investigator: Prof. Robert Gaizauskas
University of Sheffield, full-time Research Associate in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group, Department of Computer Science (06/2012-present):
Project: FP7 TaaS project
The project aims to perform term translation for all EU languages.
Principle Investigator: Prof. Robert Gaizauskas
University of Sheffield, full-time Research Associate in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group, Department of Computer Science (01/2010-07/2012):
Project: FP7 ACCURAT project
The project aims to collect comparable corpora to improve Statistical Machine Translation for under resourced languages.
Principle Investigator: Prof. Robert Gaizauskas
University of Sheffield, part-time Research Associate in the Information Retrieval (IR) group, Department of Information Studies (10/2007-12/2009):
Project: FP6 TRIPOD project
The project was about generation of image captions for images pertaining to geo-graphical objects.
Principle Investigator: Prof. Mark Sanderson & Prof. Robert Gaizauskas
University of Sheffield, part-time Research Associate in the Information Retrieval (IR) group, Department of Information Studies (05/2010-10/2010):
Project: The National Archives (TNA) initiated project
The project was about analysing search engines queries and proposing suggestions for improvement of the TNA in house search engine.
Principle Investigator: Prof. Mark Sanderson & Dr. Paul Clough
University of Sheffield, part-time Software Developer, Organizations, Information and Knowledge (OAK) group, Department of Computer Science (08/2008-10/2009)
Role: Software Developer on the X-Media Project
Principle Investigator: Prof. Fabio Ciravegna & Dr. Daniala Petrelli
University of Sheffield, part-time Research Associate in the NLP group, Department of Computer Science (09/2007-12/2007)
Project: Lycos founded research
Principle Investigator: Prof. Fabio Ciravegna
GBTEC Software+Consulting AG in Bochum (12/2004-04/2006):
Role: Full-time Software Developer for web-based process management enterprise applications
Polk Marketingsystems GmbH in Essen (10/2003-04/2004):
Role: Part-time Software Tester
Teaching
University of Sheffield, Teaching Java for Sun Java Certification (05/2009-09/2009). The aim was preparing Computer Science students at the University of Sheffield for Java Certification exams.
University of Sheffield, Teaching Java (02/08-06/08)
Aim was to teach Java to PhD students who are not familiar with the language. Covered topics: JAVA Basics (syntax, containers, OOP)
University of Sheffield, Leading a Discussion Group on Software Design Patterns in Java (10/2006-06/2007).
Covered patterns:
Creational: Singleton, Abstract Factory, Factory, Prototype; Structural: Adapter, Bridge, Composite, Facade, Proxy; Behavioural: Observer, Template, State
University of Sheffield, Java Lab Demonstration (09/2007-12/2007 and 02/2008-05/2008)
University of Dortmund, Tutor in C++ programming (10/2004-04/2005 and 10/2005-04/2006)
University of Essen, Teaching secondary school students in Mathematics and Computer Science (10/2000-10/2005)
University of Dortmund, Student tutor in Data Structures and Java programming (04-10/2003)
Publications
Published several research papers in peer-reviewed conferences including the top ranking conferences such as Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), International Conference on Information and
Knowledge Management (CIKM) and European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). Currently I have 3 journal papers, one in review and 2 in preparation.
Ahmet Aker, Monica Paramita, Robert Gaizauskas (2013): Extracting bilingual terminologies from comparable corpora. In proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio, Ahmet Aker, Robert Gaizauskas (2013): Summarizing On-line Product and Service Reviews Using Aspect Rating Distributions and Language Modeling. Journal of Intelligent Systems, IEEE.
Ahmet Aker, Laura Plaza, Elena Lloret (2013): Do humans have conceptual models about Geographic Objects? A user study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). ISSN: 1532-2890.
Elena Lloret, Laura Plaza, Ahmer Aker. 2012. Analyzing the Capabilities of Crowdsourcing Services for Text Summarization. Language Resources and Evaluation (LRE) journal.
Aker, A. & Feng, Y. & Gaizauskas, R. (2012), Automatic bilingual phrase extraction from comparable corpora. 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012), IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India, 2012.
Aker, A. & Fan, X. & Sanderson, M. & Gaizauskas, R. (2012), Investigating summarization techniques for geo-tagged image indexing, in Proceedings of the International Conference on European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR).
Aker, A. & El-Haj, M. & Albakour, M. & Kruschwitz, U. (2012), Assessing crowdsourcing quality through objective tasks, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC).
Aker, A. & Kanoulas, E. & Gaizauskas, R. (2012), A light way to collect comparable corpora from the web, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC).
Kurtic, E. & Wells, B. & Brown, G. & Kempton, T. & Aker, A. (2012), A corpus of spontaneous multi-party conversation in bosnian serbo-croatian and british english, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC).
Paramita, M. & Clough, P. & Aker, A. & Gaizauskas, R. (2012), Correlation between similarity measures for wikipedia, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC).
Skadina, I. & Aker, A., Mastropavlos, N., Su, F., Tufis, D., Verlic, M., Vasiljevs, A. Babych, B., Paramita, M., Clough, P., Gaizauskas, R. & Glaros, N. (2012), Collecting and using comparable corpora for statistical machine translation, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC).
Aker, A & Plaza, L. & Lloret, E. & Gaizauskas, R. 2012. Multi-document Summarization Techniques for Generating Image Descriptions: A Comparative Analysis. Multi-source, Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization (Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing).
Aker, A. & Gaizauskas, R. (2011), Understanding the types of information humans associate with geographic objects, in Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), pp. 1929-1932.
Di Fabbrizio, G. & Aker, A. & Gaizauskas, R. (2011), Starlet: Multi-document summarization of service and product reviews with balanced rating distributions, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), pp. 67- 74.
Lloret, E. & Plaza, L. & Aker, A. (2011), Multi-document summarization by capturing the information users are interested in, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP).
Aker, A. & Gaizauskas, R. (2010), Generating image descriptions using dependency relational patterns, in Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 1250-1258.
Aker, A. & Cohn, T. & Gaizauskas, R. (2010), Multi-document summarization using A* search and discriminative training, in Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 482-491.
Fan, X. & Aker, A. & Tomko, M., Smart, P. & Sanderson, M. & Gaizauskas, R. (2010), Automatic image captioning from the web for gps photographs, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR), pp. 445-448.
Aker, A. & Gaizauskas, R. (2010), Model summaries for location-related images, Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC).
Plaza, L. & Lloret, E. & Aker, A. (2010), Improving automatic image captioning using text summarization techniques, Proceedings of the International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD) pp. 165-172.
Skadina, I. & Aker, A. & Giouli, V. & Tufis, D. & Gaizauskas, R. & Mierina, M. & Mastropavlos, N. (2010), A collection of comparable corpora for under-resourced languages, in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference Baltic HLT, pp. 161-168.
Aker, A.& Gaizauskas, R. (2009), Summary generation for toponym-referenced images using object type language models, Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP) pp. 6-11.
Gornostay, T. & Aker, A. (2009), Development and implementation of multilingual object type toponym-referenced text corpora for optimizing automatic image description, in Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics , May 27-31, Bekasovo, Russia.
Aker, A. & Gaizauskas, R. (2008), Evaluating automatically generated user-focused multi-document summaries for geo-referenced images, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Multi-source Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization (MMIES), pp. 41-48.
Past Projects
Automated GUI generation from XML specifications
Designed and implemented of the core GUI generator in Java & Project management
Linguistic annotation tools
Developed software tools in Java to aid and speed up linguistic annotation of co-referring expressions and overlapping speech in conversations
Web based experimental and evaluation tools
Developed several JSP based web applications to aid experimental data collection and evaluation for information retrieval and machine translation related research
Supervised student projects
Third Year Project Supervision on "An iPhone application for photo captioning"
Master Student Supervision on "Implementing a smart automatic web search for places"
Further Activities
· Internship in Siemens VDO, Database programming and system administration
· Attended a summer school on Machine Learning
o One week course, covered subjects include supervised/un-supervised and reinforcement learning techniques
· Research paper review for the conferences:
o ACM International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) (2014)
o ACM International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) (2013)
o European conference on information retrieval (ECIR) (2013)
o European conference on information retrieval (ECIR) (2011)
o Recent advanced in the natural language processing (RANLP) (2011)
o International joint conference on natural language processing (IJCNLP) (2011)
· Research paper review for the journals:
o Language Resources and Evaluation (LRE) (2014)
o EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing (2013)
o Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology (2013)
o Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2013)
o Information Processing & Management (IMP542) (2012)
· Scientific Committee member for the following events:
o Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation (3rd HyTra), EACL 2014
· Organizing Committee member for the following events:
o 7th Workshop on building and using comparable corpora, LREC 2014.
Awards & Grants
· 2013: University of Sheffield Exceptional Achievement Award (4% award rate)
· 2013: Visual Sense (ViSen) (named researcher)
· 2012: University of Sheffield Exceptional Achievement Award (4% award rate)
· 2003-2005: Scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (awarded to 1% of all university students in Germany)
· 2009: Achieved the best Master Degree from the University of Sheffield
Skills
Key technical skills:
Programming languages (Java, C++, Perl, Python, Scala), Web Development (Javascript, HTML, JSP, WebWork, Struts, Tomcat), Databases (MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server), Testing tools (JUnit, JMock, EasyMock), NLP/IR related tools (Lucene, GATE, OpenNLP, Stanford Parser and various other tools/frameworks), ML related tools (WEKA, SVMLight, MERT), SMT related tools (Giza++, Moses, SRILM, etc.), IDEs (Eclipse), Spring, Hibernate
Languages:
Turkish and German (native), English (fluent), Bosnian (basics)
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