TEKNOFEST Turkish Natural Language Processing Competition Final Completed

The final of the “TEKNOFEST Turkish Natural Language Processing Competition” held in Kocaeli was completed in the Informatics Valley with the participation of 163 teams and 531 competitors.

In the competition, which aims to create international technology brands in the field of “Turkish Natural Language Processing”, technology awareness is increased with studies that will contribute to the development of user-friendly and high-performance libraries and data sets for processing Turkish texts. Students developed projects on data generation, using open source tools, developing data clocks and converting unsigned data into marked data.

It was announced that the teams that won the competition, in which the finalists made their presentations in the “Free” and “Natural Language Processing Scenario” categories were evaluated, would be awarded a total of 480 thousand liras and the results of the competition would be published on the Turkish Technology Team Foundation (T3) website in the coming days.

“We also started a study on Turkey’s large language model ‘T3 AI'”

Türkiye Technology Team Foundation Board of Directors Chairwoman Elvan Kuzucu Hıdır said that applications for TEKNOFEST reached 1.6 million in 2024.

Hıdır, who stated that the Turkish Natural Language Processing Competition was important to them, said, “It is one of the most important competitions for us. We usually organize it online, but this year it was held face to face for the first time. In this sense, I think it is very valuable to physically breathe this atmosphere.”

Hıdır underlined that it is important to use artificial intelligence properly and create products that will make things easier in every area of ​​life, and stated that artificial intelligence is in every phase of life.

Hıdır, who mentioned that they are working with Turkey’s major language model ‘T3 AI’ together with Selçuk Bayraktar, said, “It is valuable that the Turkish data set creates a data set that is both high quality and balanced. You will carry out the work to be done in many valuable areas to develop products that touch many areas of our lives. We will expect you to develop products in areas such as education, law and health. We will expect you to develop products using our ‘T3 AI’ model.”

Turkish Language Association President Prof. Dr. Osman Mert also told the young people participating in the competition that they would take Turkey, its culture and language, much further.

Emphasizing that language is at the center of all branches of science, Mert said, “Our country is at a very good point regarding the subjects you work on, but it will get better with you. Language is at the center of all branches of science. You learned all the information you have now in Turkish and you will teach it. If you have Turkish, you are in, if you don’t, you are out. We learned our culture, our identity, our religion, and the information about every branch of science in Turkish. That’s why we should appreciate this, we are like fish in water, we really don’t realize it.”

Erkam Tüzgen, General Manager of Informatics Valley, explained that the aim of Informatics Valley is to serve young people.

Tüzgen said, “Our reason for existence is to serve you. To facilitate your technology development. We are working to enable you to establish your own businesses in the future, your own businesses that will serve our country, to develop technology, and to spread the technology development culture in Turkey. One of the works we do for this purpose is to host these competitions as a TEKNOFEST stakeholder.”

The program ended with a photo shoot with the young people participating in the competition.