TEKNOFEST Turkish Natural Language Processing Competition

The Turkish Natural Language Processing Competition, held as part of the TEKNOFEST Technology Festival, is a competition focused on artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, aiming to contribute to the digital transformation of the Turkish language. By supporting projects that transfer Turkish linguistic structures and cultural heritage into digital environments, the competition encourages the development of local and national solutions in the field of language technologies.

Purpose and Scope of the TEKNOFEST Turkish Natural Language Processing Competition

The primary objective of the competition is to accelerate the digital transformation of Turkish and ensure the development of Turkish-specific solutions through artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies. Participants develop projects in areas such as sentiment analysis, text summarization, machine translation, question-answer systems, and other text processing applications.

The competition is not merely a software development process; it also aims to foster a deeper understanding of the Turkish language and the conversion of this knowledge into technological solutions. Participants are expected to comprehend the morphological and syntactic characteristics unique to Turkish and integrate them into digital applications.

Due to its agglutinative structure and semantic richness, Turkish presents both challenges and opportunities for natural language processing. This competition seeks to enhance Turkish representation in the digital world by encouraging innovative approaches to overcome these challenges. At the same time, it aims to promote accurate and meaningful use of Turkish in digital spaces by taking into account the cultural dimensions of the language.

Participants and Project Topics

The competition specifically targets young entrepreneurs, high school and university students. Participants submit projects individually or in teams. The following topics are supported during the competition:

• Sentiment analysis: Detecting emotional tone in Turkish texts.
• Text summarization: Extracting meaningful summaries from long texts.
• Machine translation: Developing translation systems between Turkish and other languages.
• Question-answer systems: Generating accurate responses to questions based on a specific knowledge base.
• Language model development: Creating large-scale language models tailored for Turkish.

Academic and Industrial Contributions

The outcomes of the competition are not limited to academic publications or prototype applications; they can also form the foundation for products that contribute to Türkiye’s technology ecosystem. The competition serves as a bridge between universities and industry, providing young researchers with opportunities to bring their projects to life.

The TEKNOFEST Turkish Natural Language Processing Competition is a significant step toward making Turkish more visible, processable, and accessible in the digital world. It contributes to Türkiye’s participation in global competition in the field of language technologies. At the same time, this competition encourages young people to actively engage in the technological production process.