Danushka Bollegala

Danushka Bollegala

Professor@UoL, Amazon Scholar@Amazon
I am Danushka Bollegala, Professor in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the Department of Computer Science, The University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. I lead the Machine Learning (ML) and NLP Research Groups. I am also an Amazon Scholar working at the cutting-edge information retrieval problems at Amazon Search. I am amazed by the human ability to understand languages and investigate methods to teach such skills to machines. For this purpose, I conduct research and publish the findings in Natural Language Processing (NLP) venues such as ACL, EMNLP, COLING etc. and Artificial Intelligence (AI) venues such as IJCAI and AAAI. I am attracted to simple and efficient ideas that are scalable and robust when applied to massive, noisy datasets as often encountered in real-world NLP applications used by millions of users world wide. I value the ability to create systems that are useful for humans and collaborate with industrial partners to establish the social and commercial impact of my research. I want to understand things deeply, and enjoy explaining those to students, colleagues as well as to the general public in simple terms. I often deliver research talks and lectures for this purpose. I have native-level proficiency in Sinhala, English and Japanese. I was born in Sri Lanka and have lived the major part of my life in Japan and the United Kingdom.
Contact

Works

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Deep Learning Text Book

This is a one of the pioneering and best selling textbooks written in Japanese on Deep Learning. It covers both theoretical fundamentals of Deep Learning as well as its applications to various domains such as text and vision.

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Machine Learning on Web Data

This book, written in Japanse, explains the NLP techniques that are applicable on Web text mining. It is written for Web engineers.

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Attributional and Relational Similarity on the Web

This is the book covering my PhD thesis, where I studied methods for estimating attributional and relational similarity between words using information available on the Web.

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Knowledge and Information Processing

This text book written in Japanese was used by the undergraduate students at the University of Tokyo, specialising in communication engineering.

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Biography

  • January 2019 - Current: Amazon Scholar Amazon, Cambridge, UK.
  • October 2018 - Current: Professor. Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool.
  • August 2013 - December 2018: Senior Lecturer (corresponds to US Associate Professor). Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool.
  • April 2010 - August 2013: Assistant Professor. Graduate School of Information Science, The University of Tokyo.
  • April 2011 - June 2011: Visiting Researcher. Computer Laboratory, Faculty of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, UK.
  • January 2010 - December 2010: Visiting Research Fellow. School of Informatics, University of Sussex, UK.
  • October 2009 - March 2010: Post doctoral Research Fellow.
    Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Japan.
  • April 2007 - September 2009: Research Fellow.
    Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Japan.
  • April 2005 - March 2007: Research Assistant.
    National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan.
  • April 2000 - March 2007: Foreign Student Scholarship Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan (MEXT)
Download CV

Awards

  1. Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence Best Journal Paper of the Year 2014-2015
  2. IEEE Computer Society Japan Chapter Young Author Award 2011.
  3. Best Paper Award at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2011).
  4. Best Poster Paper Award at the 11th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2010).
  5. Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence Annual Conference Award year 2010.
  6. Award for the best Doctoral Thesis in the Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Graduate School of Information Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan. 2010.
  7. Award for the best Masters Thesis in the Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Graduate School of Information Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan. 2007.
  8. Award for the best undergraduate thesis in the Department of Electronics, Electrical and Information Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Japan. 2005.

Funding

  1. Illuminating the dark metabolome: de novo identification of small molecules from their mass spectra using transformer-based deep learning, Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC), Co-I, (GBP 833,502), 2024-2027.
  2. DynAIRx: AIs for dynamic prescribing optimisation and care integration in multimorbidity, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Co-I (GBP £2,807,430), 2022-2024.
  3. Information Extraction from Medical Data using Deep Learning, Deloitte, PI (GBP 24K), 2021-2023.
  4. Deep Learning of Procedural Natural Language Understanding, PhD Studentship, University of Liverpool, PI (GBP 60k), 2017-2020.
  5. Legal Advisor Dialgoue Engine, LexSnap, PI (GBP 12k), 2017-2018.
  6. Algorithm Design for Automatic Classification of Transactions into a Taxonomy, Rosslyn Data Technologies, PI (GBP 5k), 2018-2018.
  7. Track Analytics for Effective Triage of Wide Area, Defence Science Technology Laboratory (DSTL), Co-I (GBP 243k), 2017-2019.
  8. Digital Legal Assistant, Knowledge Transfer Partnership (Innovate UK), PI (GBP 492k), 2017-2020.
  9. WEB-RADR: Recognising Adverse Drug Reactions, (European Commission) Innovative Medicine Initiative, Co-PI (GBP 471k), 2014-2017.
  10. I knew that relation from news, Innovation Voucher Scheme, University of Liverpool, PI (GBP 5k), 2015-2016.
  11. The Revierview Law Contract Map Project, Knowledge Transfer Partnership (Innovate UK), Co-PI (GBP 269k), 2015-2018.
  12. Resolving Relational Ambiguity between Entities on the Web, Microsoft Research (MSR) CORE-9 Research Grant, PI, (USD 17K), 2013–2015.
  13. Domain Adaptation for Semantic Relation Extraction, Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Research Grant for Young Researchers (B). PI (USD 40K), 2012–2015.
  14. Cross-Language Relational Search, Microsoft Research (MSR) CORE-7 Research Grant, PI, (USD 26K), 2011-2012.
  15. Developing a Cross-Language Web Search Engine, Information Technology Promotion Agency of Japan (IPA) grant for explorative software development (Mito Project), PI, (USD 40K), 2010-2011.
  16. A Latent Relational Search Engine, Google Research Award, Co-PI, (USD 25K), 2010–2011.
  17. Developing a Relational Search Engine to Retrieve Semantic Relations between Entities, Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) research grant, PI. (USD 40K), 2010-2012.
  18. Research grant for overseas visiting scholars, Global Centers of Excellence (GCOE), Japan. PI. (USD 13K), April 2011–June 2011.
  19. Extracting Attributes for Entities using Web Data, Global Centers of Excellence (GCOE), Japan. Sole PI. (USD 10K), 2010-2011.
  20. Learning to Rank Entities on the Web, Microsoft Research (MSR) CORE-6 Research Grant, Co-PI, (USD 26K), 2010-2011.
  21. Using Web Mining to Provide Useful Information to Drivers, Toyota InfoTechnology Center, Co-PI, (USD 40K) 2009-2012.
  22. Disambiguating Personal Names on the Web, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Grant PI. (USD 40K), 2007-2009.
  23. Using Network Theory and Machine Learning to Structure and Represent Information Available on the Web, Co-PI, (USD 400K), 2009–2012.

Academic Services/Reviewing/Teaching

  • Program Chair: *SEM 2024
  • Programme Chair: System Demonstrations at [ACL 2023](https://2023.aclweb.org/committees/organization/).
  • Area Chair: EMNLP 2019, Machine Learning.
  • Area Chair: COLING 2014, Information Extraction and Database Linking Track
  • Editor: Journal of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (2012-2015)
  • Conference Reviewer/Program Committee (multiple years) ACL, EMNLP, COLING, IJCAI, AAAI, NeurIPS, GECCO, ICRA
  • Journal Reviewer: Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), Information Processing and Managament Journal (Elsevier IPM), Journal of Web Semantics (JWEB) ACM Transactions on Asian Language Processing (TALIP), PLoS One.
  • I used to teach data mining as a master-level module at the Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, previously. I no longer teach this module.

Contact

Office

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Phone:
Please see the map to Ashton building here. Map My office is in the second floor.

Personal email address