Mingyu Derek Ma

PhD Student

Hi!

I’m a second-year PhD student at UCLA Computer Science Department working with Dr. Nanyun (Violet) Peng at PLUS lab.

I’m broadly interested in a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) problems and my recent research focus is developing a system that can learn how to organize events contained in unstructured information into generic event ontology which are able to benefit downstream event-focused analytics.

I received my bachelor’s degree in Computing from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University with First Class Honours in 2018 and exchanged at the University of Maryland in 2016. Before joining UCLA, I worked at PolyU, The Chinese University of Hong Kong and USC Information Sciences Institute.

Contact me:
mdma at ucla.edu | | he/his/him

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curriculum vitae

Education

University of California, Los Angeles
PhD Student in Computer Science
Since 2020; Los Angeles, CA
University of Southern California
PhD Student in Computer Science
2019 - 2020; Los Angeles, CA
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Bachelor of Science in Computing
(First Class Honours)
2014 - 2018; Hong Kong
University of Maryland, College Park
Exchange Student
2016; College Park, MD

Experience

UCLA Computer Science Department
Graduate Student Researcher, Since Sep 2020; Los Angeles, CA
USC Information Sciences Institute
Graduate Research Assistant, Aug 2019 - Aug 2020; Marina del Rey, CA
The Chinese University of Hong Kong Human-Computer Communications Lab & Stanley Ho Big Data Decision Analytics Research Centre
Research Assistant, Jan - July 2019; Hong Kong
UC Santa Cruz Natural Language and Dialogue Systems Lab
Research Intern to Prof. Marilyn Walker, Jun - Oct 2018; Santa Cruz, CA
SlugBot for Amazon Alexa Prize and Implicit Discourse Relation Identification for Open-domain Dialogues
PolyU Department of Computing
Capstone Project Student, Sep 2017 - June 2018; Hong Kong
PolyU Internet and Mobile Computing Lab
Student Assistant, Jan 2017 - June 2018; Hong Kong

MIT Geospatial Data Center
Research Intern to Dr. Abel Sanchez and Prof. John R. Williams, Jul - Aug 2017; Cambridge, MA
A Learning and Grading Solution for Engineering Computation Education
SOHU.com
Front-end Web Development Intern, Jun - Jul 2016; Shanghai, China

Services

Reviewer: EMNLP2019 Workshop DeepLo

Handbook: ACL2020

Secondary Reviewer: EMNLP2019

Webmaster: Creative Computing Co-working Space, PolyU Computing

Talks

Awards

Outstanding Project Award - Best Capstone Project Award Competition, PolyU Dept. of Computing: only one in the Dept. of Computing , 2018

HKSAR Government Scholarship Fund Talent Development Scholarship (website), Hong Kong Government , 2018

Silver Award - Hong Kong ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) Awards (website | wiki) Student Innovation Award (Tertiary or Above), Office of the Government Chief Information Officer of the Innovation and Technology Bureau of Hong Kong Government , 2018

Champion and Most Innovative Award (HKSAR) - Imagine Cup (website | wiki), Microsoft , 2017

Commercial Radio 50th Anniversary Scholarship, Hong Kong Commercial Broadcasting Company Limited & PolyU: only 1 in the Dept. of Computing , 2017

Winner - Hong Kong Techathon (website), PolyU and City University of Hong Kong, 2018

Graduate Representative for Valedictory Speech - PolyU 24th Congregation COMP Session, PolyU Faculty of Engineering, 2018

CMA (The Chinese Manufacturers’ Association of Hong Kong) & Donors Scholarship (website), CMA & PolyU: only 3 in the Dept. of Computing, 2018

Best Creative Service Project - Youth Volunteer Service Conference (website), Agency for Volunteer Service of Hong Kong Government (website), 2017

Champion - PolyU Smart Computing Competition (website), PolyU Dept. of Computing, 2017

Undergraduate Summer Research Abroad Sponsorship (website), PolyU International Affairs Office, 2017

Chinese Mainland and Overseas Activities Fund, PolyU Office of Student Development, 2016

Wong Tit-Shing Student Exchange Scholarship (website), PolyU Faculty of Engineering, 2016

PolyU Exchange Scholarship, PolyU Faculty of Engineering, 2016

publications

New! EventPlus: A Temporal Event Understanding Pipeline

Mingyu Derek Ma , Jiao Sun, Mu Yang, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Nuan Wen, Shikhar Singh, Rujun Han, Nanyun Peng

Preprint, 2021.

A temporal event understanding pipeline that integrates various state-of-the-art event understanding components including event trigger and type detection, event argument detection, event duration and temporal relation extraction.

PDF Video

Dual Memory Network Model for Sentiment Analysis of Review Text

Jiaxing Shen, Mingyu Derek Ma , Rong Xiang, Qin Lu, Elvira Perez Vallejos, Ge Xu, Chu-Ren Huang, Yunfei Long

Knowledge-Based Systems, 2019.

Propose a dual user and product memory network (DUPMN) model to learn user profiles and product information for reviews classification using separate memory networks

PDF Code DOI

Implicit Discourse Relation Identification for Open-domain Dialogues

Mingyu Derek Ma , Kevin K. Bowden, Jiaqi Wu, Wen Cui, Marilyn Walker

ACL, 2019.

Create a novel dataset of implicit discourse relation argument pairs and labels for dialogic turns

PDF Code Dataset Poster DOI

Dual Memory Network Model for Biased Product Review Classification

Yunfei Long, Mingyu Derek Ma , Qin Lu, Rong Xiang, Chu-Ren Huang

EMNLP WASSA, 2018.

Use of separate memory networks for user profile and product information helps sentiment analysis on Yelp and IMDB datasets

PDF Code Poster DOI

BlocHIE: a BLOCkchain-based platform for Healthcare Information Exchange