About Me

Hi there! I’m Onur Keleş, a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and an IMPRS affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. I hold an M.A. (GPA: 4.0) and B.A. Summa Cum Laude (GPA: 4.0) from Boğaziçi University.

Sign Language Linguistics Multimodality & Iconicity Spatial Language Psycholinguistics Computational Linguistics Endangered Languages

My research sits at the intersection of cognitive science and NLP, investigating how visual-spatial modality shapes language in deaf signers, hearing gesture users, and vision–language models. I work with Dr. Kadir Gökgöz and Dr. Nazik Dinçtopal Deniz at Boğaziçi, and collaborate with Dr. Aslı Özyürek and Dr. Esam Ghaleb at MPI.

News

Apr 2026Paper accepted at ACL 2026 (Main): The Visual Iconicity Challenge — evaluating VLMs on sign language form–meaning mapping. [arXiv]
Mar 2026Two poster presentations at HSP 2026 (Boston, US): agentive iconicity in VLMs [Abstract] & NPI processing in L2 Turkish [Poster].
Oct 2025Book chapter published in Empirical Insights into Language and Cognition (Nobel Akademik Yayıncılık). [PDF]
Sep 2025Invited talk at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: Iconicity in visual communication: From silent gestures and signs to vision–language models. [Slides]
Sep 2025Two poster presentations at AMLaP 2025 (Prague): L2 thematic role processing [Poster] & task effects in good-enough parsing [Poster].
May 2025Two papers at NAACL 2025 workshops: good-enough parsing with LLMs [CMCL] and Hamshentsnag NLP [LM4UC].
Mar 2025Poster presentation at HSP 2025 (Maryland, US): pragmatics predicts phonetic reduction in TİD narratives. [Poster]