Recep Firat Cekinel is a Turkish NLP researcher who recently obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU). He spent 13 months as a visiting predoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen and is currently a researcher on the EU-funded EXA4MIND project, where he develops NLP pipelines that convert natural language into database queries using large language models. His research focuses on responsible, scalable AI systems and bridges foundational NLP work with real-world applications. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University (METU), Türkiye Visiting Predoctoral Researcher, University of Tübingen, Germany (13 months) Research Interests: Dr. Cekinel’s work spans natural language processing , multimodal fact-checking , explainable AI , and large language models . He is particularly interested in building responsible and scalable AI systems that integrate foundational research with practical deployments, such as natural-language interfaces for high-performance computing environments. Recent Publication Trends: His 2025 publications reveal a concentrated effort on multilingual and multimodal fact-checking , satire-style debiasing , and NL-to-database-query generation . Earlier work explores graph-based event extraction , Turkish irony detection , and cultural-heritage text mining , demonstrating a trajectory from low-resource Turkish NLP toward globally applicable, responsible-AI systems. Contact & Code: Email: rfcekinel@ceng.metu.edu.tr Office: METU Computer Eng. Dept. A-206, 06800 Ankara, Turkey Phone: +90-(312)-210-5593 GitHub: firatcekinel Google Scholar: profile available