Dilek Hakkani-Tur
About
Dilek Hakkani-Tür is a Professor of Computer Science at Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an Amazon Scholar (at Amazon Health Science). More recently, she worked as a senior principal scientist at Amazon Alexa AI focusing on enabling natural dialogues with machines (2018-2023). Prior to that, she was leading a dialogue research team at Google Research (2016-2018), a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (2010-2016), International Computer Science Institute (ICSI, 2006-2010) and AT&T Labs-Research (2001-2005). She received her BSc degree from Middle East Technical Univ, in 1994, and MSc and PhD degrees from Bilkent Univ., Department of Computer Engineering, in 1996 and 2000, respectively. Her research interests include conversational AI, natural language and speech processing, spoken dialogue systems, and machine learning for language processing. She has over 80 patents that were granted and co-authored more than 300 papers in these areas. She also received several best paper awards for publications she co-authored on conversational systems, including her earlier work on active learning for dialogue systems, from IEEE Signal Processing Society, ISCA and EURASIP. She served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2005-2008), a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (2009-2014), area editor for speech and language processing for Elsevier's Digital Signal Processing Journal and IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2011-2013), and served on the ISCA Advisory Council (2015-2019). She also served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2019-2021), and an IEEE Distinguished Industry Speaker (2021). Currently, she serves as the SigDial President, NAACL Board member and co-Editor-in-Chief of Transactions of ACL. She is a fellow of the IEEE (2014), ISCA (2014), and ACL (2024).
Research Performance Summary
First Recorded Paper
Automatic detection of sentence boundaries and disfluencies based on recognized words
Year: 1998
Citations: 214
Venue: Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing
Latest Recorded Paper
Better slow than sorry: Introducing positive friction for reliable dialogue systems
Year: 2025
Citations: 10
Venue: arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.17348
Last 10 Years Publication Activity
This timeline shows the professor's yearly publication activity.