About me
I am a post-doctoral researcher at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), which is a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute. I am part of both Speech & Language group (SL@TTIC) and Perception and Learning Systems (PALS) groups.
As an interdisciplinary researcher working on sign languages, my research focuses on how human mind organizes visual modality and uses its simultaneous nature to realize the semantic and pragmatic notions across languages and populations. I am specifically interested in how manual domain (hands) and nonmanual domain (face and body movements) are modulated to convey semantic notions such as certainty, information structure, or prominence and (a)typicality across languages such as American Sign Language (ASL), Turkish Sign Language (TİD), Nicaraguan Sign Language (LSN), and populations such as early acquirers, late acquirers, or emerging sign language users. I am currently extending my skillset to computational models trained on sign languages and to test their capacity to capture this simultaneous nature.
I was previously a post-doctoral researcher at Dr. Diane Brentari’s Sign Language Linguistics Laboratory at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics at Purdue University under Dr. Ronnie B. Wilbur’s supervision. If you want to know more about my research, you can find my CV here.
While not working on sign languages, you can find me exploring the city with my retriever-mix rescue dog, Oscar, going on hikes, swimming, or picking up a new hobby.
Recent News
July 2026 Our work with Cem Barutçu is accepted to the FEAST Conference as a stage presentation in July. Kudos to Cem because this work evolved from his term project on Clausal Question-Answer Pairs (CQA) in TİD! Happy to connect with old friends and make new ones! See you in Amsterdam!
May 2026 Our new preprint is out! We introduce ASL-MTP and use it to analyze how current models handle key linguistic phenomena in ASL. Our findings show that models rely heavily on manual cues and often miss crucial nonmanual information—highlighting a gap in modeling simultaneous structure in sign languages. This is a step toward more linguistically grounded evaluation of multimodal language models. The project was started with Shester’s idea and design, and huge shout-out to all my collaborators!
May 2026 I will hold a discussion on sign languages in Making Waves in May. Details about the topic and discussion are upcoming! Hope to see everyone online!
February 2026 I will present our study on evaluating sign language models in Second Workshop on Assistive and Inclusive Technology on 3rd February. If you are in Urbana, IL, hope to see you there!
January 2026 I will be presenting my work with Diane Brentari on prominence and atypicality in ASL and TİD at LSA 2026. Excited to meet and catch up with friends, and make new ones!
November 2025 I shared my pose estimation study findings on head nods in ASL and TİD at Sign Langauge Grammars, Parsing Models, and the Brain Workshop.