Biography
I am currently in my fourth year of pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Boston University, where I am being mentored by Prof. Derry Wijaya. Previouly I have worked at Amazon with Dr. Emilio Monti and at Fair(Meta) where I worked with Dr. Dieuwke Hupkes.
My research focused on developing strong cross-lingual representation learning techniques and evaluating machine translation systems. Currently, my interest lies in deepening my understanding of evaluations for Large Language Models (LLMs). This involves looking at a lot of data, examining the benchmarks used to measure LLMs generalization capabilities, and investigating potential unnoticed factors, such as contamination, that might affect our evaluation methods. Additionally, I have a keen interest in working on computational social science projects, particularly those that I believe have a significant impact.
- Better Evaluating LLMs
- Robust Representation Learning
- Understanding what is in our pre-training data
- Evaluating Machine Translation
- Computational Social Science
PhD in Computer Science, 2020 -
Boston University
MSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, 2017 - 2020
Bogazici University
BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, 2012 -2017
Bogazici University
Publications
Experience
- My current focus in research is learning better cross lingual representations through multitask and contrastive learning that will allow solving multiple cross lingual tasks more robustly.
- Working on bias detection in natural language data(books and news) through time within 2021 Google Research Scholar Program.
- Leading research project for Ottoman handwritten text recognition which received $50K from the Scientific Research Council of Turkey(TUBITAK).
Supervisor: Derry Wijaya
- Worked in the Semantic Understanding team. My project was focused on better evaluating and improving compositional generalization abilities of Semantic Parsing models
- Created an extension to TMCD splits that has more robust convergence to compositionally challenging splits.
- Worked on improving compositional generalization through meta learning and chain‑of‑thought prompting.
- Worked quantifying characteristics of train‑test split that make a split compositionally challenging.
Supervisor: Emilio Monti
- Founded company, led business development and managed client relations. Worked with the C‐Suite of LC Waikiki, multi‐billion retailer present in 40 countries, to guide their AI strategy to increase online sales.
- Deployed an ML model for LCWaikiki for behavioral customer segmentation, customer life time value prediction and churn analysis that achieved +100% increase in conversion rates for targeted ads.
- Worked with DEDAS, one of Turkey’s biggest electricity distributors,to detect illegal uses of electricity and increased the detection rate by +150%.
- Joined AI team as a founding member. Engineered a text classification pipeline for routing customer issues.
- Led conversational modeling project which secured a grant from Scientific Research Council of Turkey(TUBITAK).
Contact
- kocyigit@bu.edu
- 111 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA 02215