Bahar İlgen, Ph.D.

Overview Selected Publications

About

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Visualization Group (ZKI-PH5) of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Public Health (ZKI-PH) at the Robert Koch Institute, where I also serve as deputy group lead. I received my PhD in Computer Engineering from Istanbul Technical University. Following that, I worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Istanbul Kültür University. Before joining ZKI-PH, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Language Technology Group at the Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg.

Research Interests

  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • Explainability, Interpretability & Uncertainty in AI
  • Machine Learning
  • Information Retrieval
  • Representation Learning for Language
  • Multimodal NLP
  • Natural Language Generation

My research focuses on Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on bridging language, learning, and interaction. I explore how machines can understand, represent, and generate human language in context, including multimodal scenarios involving visual data. I'm particularly interested in the intersection of NLP, HCI, and vision — designing systems that are not only intelligent, but also human-centered, interpretable, and grounded in real-world user interaction.

Publications

Selected publications

  • İlgen, B., & Hattab, G. (2026). Visualizing the Chain-of-Thought in Large Language Models. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 46(1), 89–98. doi:10.1109/MCG.2025.3624666
  • İlgen, B., & Hattab, G. (2025, November). Toward Human-Centered Readability Evaluation. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (HCI+NLP) @ EMNLP (pp. 263–273). doi:10.18653/v1/2025.hcinlp-1.22
  • Dubey, A., Anžel, A., İlgen, B., & Hattab, G. (2025). UbiQTree: Uncertainty Quantification in XAI for Tree Ensembles. Patterns (in press).
  • İlgen, B., Dubey, A., & Hattab, G. (2025). PHAX: A Structured Argumentation Framework for User-Centered Explainable AI in Public Health and Biomedical Sciences. ECAI Workshop on Argumentation for eXplainable AI (ArgXAI).
  • Köckritz, J., İlgen, B., Cohrdes, C., & Hattab, G. (2025). Current Applications and Future Directions in Natural Language Processing for News Media and Mental Health. Nature Scientific Reports. doi:10.1038/s41598-025-18413-z
  • Köckritz, J., İlgen, B., & Hattab, G. (2025). Reasoning Under Distress: Mining Claims and Evidence in Mental Health Narratives. In ACL Workshop on Argument Mining. doi:10.18653/v1/2025.argmining-1.18
  • İlgen, B., & Hattab, G. (2024). Visualizing Evidence through Natural Language Interaction for Public Health Interventions. In ACM Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval (NLPIR).
  • Hattab, G., Anžel, A., Dubey, A., Ezekannagha, C., Yang, Z., & İlgen, B. (2024). Persona Adaptable Strategies Make Large Language Models Tractable. In ACM Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval (NLPIR).
  • İlgen, B., & Hattab, G. (2024). A Lexical Simplification Framework for Turkish. In ACM Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval (NLPIR).
  • Yang, Z., Dai, X., Yang, W., İlgen, B., Anžel, A., & Hattab, G. (2024). Kernel-based Learning for Safe Control of Discrete-Time Unknown Systems under Incomplete Observations. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.00822.
  • İlgen, B., Pilic, A., Harder, T., & Hattab, G. (2023, December). Pre-Training to Identify Immunization-Related Entities from Systematic Reviews. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval (pp. 234–239).
  • Ilgen, B., & Biemann, C. (2022, December). CWITR: A Corpus for Automatic Complex Word Identification in Turkish Texts. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval (pp. 157–163).
  • Yılmaz, T., Ergil, A., & İlgen, B. (2020). Deep learning-based document modeling for personality detection from Turkish texts. In Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2019: Volume 1 (pp. 729–736). Springer International Publishing.
  • Sanli, O., & Ilgen, B. (2019). Face detection and recognition for automatic attendance system. In Intelligent Systems and Applications: Proceedings of the 2018 Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) Volume 1 (pp. 237–245). Springer International Publishing.
  • Ilgen, B. (2018, May). NLP to Support Social Inclusion of Users with Special Needs. In International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Legal & Ethics Workshop (LREC2018), Miyazaki, Japan.
  • Ilgen, B., Adalı, E., & Tantuğ, A. C. (2016). Exploring feature sets for Turkish word sense disambiguation. Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, 24(5), 4391–4405.
  • Demirci, F., Karabudak, E., & Ilgen, B. (2017, September). Multi Document Summarization for Turkish News. In International Artificial Intelligence and Data Processing Symposium 2017 (IDAP 2017). IEEE.
  • İlgen, B., & Adali, E. (2014). Exploring the effect of bag-of-words and bag-of-bigram features on Turkish word sense disambiguation. Journal of Türkiye Bilişim Vakfı Bilgisayar Bilimleri ve Mühendisliği Dergisi, 8(8).
  • İlgen, B., Adalı, E., & Tantuğ, A. C. (2013). A Comparative Study to Determine the Effective Window Size of Turkish Word Sense Disambiguation Systems. In Information Sciences and Systems 2013 (pp. 169–176). Springer International Publishing.
  • İlgen, B., & Adali, E. (2012, June). The impact of collocational features in Turkish Word Sense Disambiguation. In Intelligent Engineering Systems (INES), 2012 IEEE 16th International Conference on (pp. 527–530). IEEE.
  • İlgen, B., & Adali, E. (2012, July). Building up lexical sample dataset for Turkish word sense disambiguation. In Innovations in Intelligent Systems and Applications (INISTA), 2012 International Symposium on (pp. 1–5). IEEE.
  • İlgen, B., & Ozkan, D. (2011, June). Investigation of Several Parameters on Goldbach Partitions. In 2nd International Symposium on Computing in Science and Engineering (pp. 327–314).
  • İlgen, B., & Karaoğlan, B. (2007, November). Investigation of Zipf’s “law-of-meaning” on Turkish corpora. In Computer and Information Sciences, 2007. ISCIS 2007. 22nd International Symposium on (pp. 1–6). IEEE.

Teaching

Istanbul Kültür University

Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering

  • Programming Fundamentals & Object-Oriented Design (C, C++, Java)
  • Data Structures & Algorithms
  • Machine Learning
  • Discrete Structures
  • Data / Web Mining
  • Graduate Project Supervision

Erasmus Teaching Mobility

  • Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy (2018) – Intelligent Systems (Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems, Evolutionary Computing)
  • Dennis Gabor College, Hungary (2017) – Object-Oriented Software Development

Earlier teaching

Previously Research & Teaching Assistant at Istanbul Kültür University (2007–2016) and Izmir University of Economics (2005–2007), teaching core courses such as Object-Oriented Programming, Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, Operating Systems, and Computer Organization.