I hold a PhD in linguistics and carry out interdisciplinary research by compiling (electronic) language resources, particularly by recording linguistic data in corpora (this is called linguistic annotation). My research specialties are discourse and pragmatics and their role in understanding human cognition. Recently, I have concentrated on discourse mechanisms trying to understand the role of discourse relations in human languages. I analyze (written) Turkish texts, investigate explicit and implicit ways of signalling discourse relations and try to specify the features that could be important for discourse relations.

I have been the principal developer of Turkish Discourse Bank or TDB (an electronic resource of Turkish annotated for discourse relations in the Penn Discourse TreeBank style), created with the generous support of a TUBITAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) project (No. 107E156) 2007-2011. My corpus development (and linguistic annotation) efforts go hand in hand with my research on discourse mechanisms. Linguistically annotated corpora are ultimately inputs to language technologies and TDB is the platform where our inquiries on Turkish discourse are recorded with the ultimate aim of serving theoretical investigations and future language technology applications.