Aslı Çelikyılmaz
Also known as A. Celikyilmaz, ASLI CELIKYILMAZ, ASLI ÇELIKYILMAZ, Asli Celikyilmaz, Asli Çelikyilmaz
Aslı Çelikyılmaz is a natural language processing researcher whose work spans question answering, summarization, conversational systems, and agentic AI. She earned degrees in industrial engineering and information science in Istanbul and Toronto, completed a UC Berkeley postdoctoral appointment, and joined Microsoft in 2010. Her research includes Deep Communicating Agents for abstractive summarization and Crystal, a commonsense reasoner trained with its own feedback; TACL selected her as a co-editor-in-chief in 2022. She served on the COLM 2025 award committee, gave a keynote at IWSDS 2026 as a Meta FAIR researcher, and was named to the 2026 IEEE Fellow class for contributions to conversational systems and language generation. As of October 2026, she is an Agentic AI Research Director at Microsoft and affiliate faculty at the University of Washington.
- Now at
- Microsoft and University of Washington
- Works
- 201
- Citations
- 7,098
- h-index
- 41
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Timeline
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1997–2002
Industrial engineering in Istanbul
She graduates in industrial engineering from Istanbul Technical University in 1997, then earns a master's degree in computer and information science at Seneca Polytechnic in 2002.
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2005–2008
Graduate study in Toronto
She earns a second master's degree in information science at the University of Toronto in 2005 and completes a PhD in information science there in 2008.
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2008–2010
Postdoctoral research at Berkeley
From 2008 to 2010, she works as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley on machine-learning methods for automatic text summarization and question answering.
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2010–2021
Senior researcher at Microsoft
She joins Microsoft in Sunnyvale in 2010, later becomes a senior principal researcher in Redmond, and presents “Grounding Natural Language for Embodied Agents” at Microsoft Research's 2019 Reinforcement Learning Day.
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2018
Deep communicating agents
In 2018, she and her coauthors split long documents across communicating encoders and train a shared decoder with reinforcement learning to produce coherent summaries.
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2021–2026
Meta, TACL, and Crystal
She moves to Meta in 2021, and TACL names her and Roi Reichart co-editors-in-chief in 2022. Her 2023 paper Crystal presents an introspective commonsense reasoner trained with model feedback; she serves on COLM's award committee in 2025 and gives a keynote at IWSDS 2026 as a Meta FAIR researcher.
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2026
An IEEE fellowship
IEEE names her to its 2026 Fellow class for contributions to conversational systems and language generation.
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As of October 2026
Agentic AI Research Director
As of October 2026, she is an Agentic AI Research Director at Microsoft and affiliate faculty at the University of Washington, with research on multi-agent societies and optimization.
Sources and credits
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- Aslı Çelikyılmaz - Wikipedia
- Wed, Nov 12 Asli Celikyilmaz – Intelligent PDAs | Santa Clara Valley Women in Engineering
- Grounding Natural Language for Embodied Agents - Microsoft Research
- Deep Communicating Agents for Abstractive Summarization - ACL Anthology
- Announcements | Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Crystal: Introspective Reasoners Reinforced with Self-Feedback - ACL Anthology
- COLM 2025
- SIGSDS: Spoken Interest Group on Spoken Dialogue Systems
- WMAC 2027 - Call for Papers | WMAC: Workshop on Multi-Agent Collaboration