Mingyu Derek Ma
馬明宇

PhD Student

Hi!

I'm a PhD student at USC Information Sciences Institute and Department of Computer Science. I work at the PLUS lab advised by Dr. Nanyun Peng.

My main research interest is natural language processing (NLP) 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 in 2018 and I was an exchange student at the University of Maryland in 2016. I was fortunate to work at CUHK, UCSC, MIT and PolyU on dialogue systems, sentiment analysis, blockchain and educational tech.

Contact me:
mingyu.ma[at]usc.edu | | they/he

Follow me:

News
July 3, 2020 The handbooks for ACL2020 that I helped assemble are ready and they're available in 24 timezones for the first time, check them out!
May 12, 2020 I'll move to UCLA with our lab this fall!

curriculum vitae

PDF version

Education

University of Southern California
PhD 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, Computer Science
2016; College Park, MD

Experience

USC Information Sciences Institute
Graduate Research Assistant, Aug 2019 - Sep 2020; Marina del Rey, CA
Knowledge-directed Artiﬁcial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas
The Chinese University of Hong Kong Human-Computer Communications Lab & Stanley Ho Big Data Decision Analytics Research Centre
Research Assistant to Prof. Helen Meng, Jan - July 2019; Hong Kong
V-ASK: A Voice-Enable Oral Health Survey NLP Application for Personalized Advice, Service, and Knowledge
University of California, 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 Dept. of Computing
Capstone Project Student to Prof. Qin Lu, Sep 2017 - June 2018; Hong Kong
Sentiment analysis model utilizing user profile and product information

PolyU Internet and Mobile Computing Lab
Student Assistant to Prof. Jiannong Cao, Jan 2017 - June 2018; Hong Kong
Blockchain-based Layered-federation Distributed Data Sharing and Learning Representations of Categorical Symbols by Adversarially Encoding Attribute Association
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

News by PolyU Computing

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

News by PolyU | News by PolyU Computing | News by PolyU Computing about InnoCarnival Exhibition | Tweet by PolyU

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

News by PolyU Computing | Tweet by PolyU

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

News by PolyU Computing

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

News by Office of Service-Learning, PolyU | News by HKSAR Gov Agency for Volunteer Service

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

News by PolyU Computing

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

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 Project 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 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 Project Code Poster DOI

BlocHIE: a BLOCkchain-based platform for Healthcare Information Exchange