Ece Takmaz

Dr. Ece Takmaz is a Researcher at the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht University, affiliated with the Humanities and Institute for Language Sciences. She works in the Language, Logic and Information division under Jakub Dotlacil and Albert Gatt, focusing on Natural Language Processing, Multimodal Dialogue, and Eye-Tracking research.

• PhD, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam (2019-2024)
• M.Sc., Artificial Intelligence, University of Amsterdam (2017-2019)
• M.Sc., Cognitive Science, Middle East Technical University
• B.Sc., Computer Engineering, Bilkent University

Her research investigates the intersection of vision and language integration, with a focus on eye-tracking and perception-action dynamics. Her work includes developing multimodal contextual models, analyzing CLIP's cognitive plausibility, and studying human signal variation in visuo-linguistic tasks. She has contributed to frameworks for audience-aware dialogue adaptation and transformer-based reading behavior prediction.

Recent publications cover topics like semantic violation analysis (COOCO dataset, 2025), emotion decoding in art (CogSci, 2024), and visuo-linguistic predictability (EACL, 2024). She has received recognition for best shared task paper (CMCL, 2022).

• Best Shared Task Paper Award, CMCL 2022

Dr. Takmaz actively contributes to academic service as an Area Chair for CoNLL 2025 and reviewer for top NLP/ML conferences. She serves on the organization committee for CMCL 2024-2025 and the EACL Student Board (2020-2022).