Nisansa Dilushan de Silva

I am a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. I obtained my Ph.D (2020, advisor: Dejing Dou) and MS (2016) degrees in Computer and Information Science from University of Oregon, USA and my BSc (Hons) in Computer Science & Engineering (2011) degree from University of Moratuwa. I joined University of Moratuwa as a lecturer in 2011. From 2013 to 2014, I worked as a researcher at LIRNEasia. In 2018, I worked as a Givens Associate at Argonne National Laboratory, USA. I have over 80 peer reviewed publications in the field of computer science, mostly under the subfields of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, earning more than 1400 citations. I am also an associate member of the IESL.

Professional Experience

  • Present 2020

    Senior Lecturer

    Department of Computer science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2021 2020

    Research Fellow

    LIRNEasia,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2020 2014

    Graduate Research/Teaching Fellow

    University of Oregon, Department of Computer and Information Science,
    USA.

  • 2018 2018

    Givens Associate

    Argonne National Laboratory,
    USA.

  • 2020 2011

    Lecturer

    Department of Computer science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2014 2013

    Researcher

    LIRNEasia,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2014 2013

    Visiting Lecturer

    Northshore College of Business and Technology,
    Sri Lanka

Education

  • Ph.D. 2020

    Ph.D. in Computer & Information Science

    University of Oregon, USA

  • MS 2016

    MS in Computer & Information Science

    University of Oregon, USA

  • BSc2011

    B.Sc Engineering (Hons)in Computer Science & Engineering

    University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Featured Research

Synthesis and Evaluation of a Domain-specific Large Data Set for Dungeons \& Dragons


Akila Peiris, and Nisansa de Silva

Proceedings of the 36th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, 2022, pp. 415--424,

This paper introduces the Forgotten Realms Wiki (FRW) data set and domain specific natural language generation using FRW along with related analyses. Forgotten Realms is the defacto default setting of the popular open ended tabletop fantasy role playing game, Dungeons \& Dragons. The data set was extracted from the Forgotten Realms Fandom wiki consisting of more than over 45,200 articles. The FRW data set is constituted of 11 sub-data sets in a number of formats: raw plain text, plain text annotated by article title, directed link graphs, wiki info-boxes annotated by the wiki article title, Poincaré embedding of first link graph, multiple Word2Vec and Doc2Vec models of the corpus. This is the first data set of this size for the Dungeons \& Dragons domain. We then present a pairwise similarity comparison benchmark which utilizes similarity measures. In addition, we perform D&D domain specific natural language generation using the corpus and evaluate the named entity classification with respect to the lore of Forgotten Realms.