Dilek Hakkani-Tur
Dilek Hakkani-Tur develops conversational AI, with research on language understanding and agents that help people complete tasks. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Middle East Technical University in 1994, followed by a master’s in 1996 and doctorate in 2000 at Bilkent. The graduate degrees were in its Computer Engineering Department. She and her team study knowledge-grounded language models for conversational systems and the Alexa Prize Simbot Challenge. Their work addresses task completion, multimodal understanding and teachable agents. Their work includes datasets and benchmarks for human–robot conversation.
- Works
- 130
- Citations
- 1,064
- h-index
- 17
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1994–2000
Education in computer engineering
She earned a bachelor’s degree from Middle East Technical University in 1994, followed by a master’s in 1996 and doctorate in 2000 at Bilkent. The graduate degrees were in its Computer Engineering Department.
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2001–2016
Research across language and speech laboratories
She worked at AT&T Labs–Research from 2001 to 2005, the International Computer Science Institute from 2006 to 2010 and Microsoft Research from 2010 to 2016. Her research fields include spoken dialogue systems and machine learning for language processing.
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2016–2023
Dialogue research at Google and Alexa
She led a dialogue research team at Google from 2016 to 2018 and worked as a senior principal scientist at Amazon Alexa AI from 2018 to 2023. She focused on enabling natural dialogue with machines during her Alexa period.
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As of October 2026
Grounded conversations and task agents
She and her team study knowledge-grounded language models for conversational systems and the Alexa Prize Simbot Challenge. Their work addresses task completion, multimodal understanding and teachable agents. Their work includes datasets and benchmarks for human–robot conversation.
Sources and credits
Photo: siebelschool.illinois.edu; Dilek Hakkani-Tur profile photograph; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: siebelschool.illinois.edu. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.