Cagri Toraman

Cagri Toraman is an Assistant Professor at Middle East Technical University's Computer Engineering Department, leading the Applied NLP Group. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Bilkent University (2017) and has industry experience as Software Engineer (Havelsan 2017-2018), Postdoctoral Research Scientist (University of Central Florida 2018-2019), and NLP Team Lead (Aselsan 2020-2023).

• PhD in Computer Science (Bilkent University, 2017)
• Postdoctoral Research Scientist (University of Central Florida, 2018-2019)
• NLP Team Lead (Aselsan, 2020-2023)

His research focuses on Natural Language Processing, Generative AI, and Social Computing, with particular emphasis on low-resource language adaptation, hate speech detection, multimodal analysis, and misinformation identification. Recent work examines dataset quality evaluation, transformer optimization with tweet-specific elements, and pejorative language disambiguation for misogyny detection.

Notable achievements include receiving the Google Gemma Academic Research Award 2024. He teaches core courses in Data Structures and Applied Natural Language Processing, emphasizing both theoretical foundations and practical implementation.

Research trends show expertise across:

• Multilingual dataset creation (MiDe22, JL-Hate)
• Transformer-based hate speech detection
• Generative AI adaptation for Turkish
• Ensemble learning in socio-political event extraction
• Contextual word embeddings analysis
• Conversational system robustness