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

Word Vector Embeddings and Domain Specific Semantic based Semi-Supervised Ontology Instance Population


V. Jayawardana, D. Lakmal, N. de Silva, A. Perera, K. Sugathadasa, B. Ayesha, and M. Perera

International Journal on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1, 2017,

An ontology defines a set of representational primitives which model a domain of knowledge or discourse. With the arising fields such as information extraction and knowledge management, the role of ontology has become a driving factor of many modern day systems. Ontology population, on the other hand, is a inherently problematic process, as it needs manual intervention to prevent the conceptual drift. The semantic sensitive word embedding has become a popular topic in natural language processing with its capability to cope with the semantic challenges. Incorporating domain specific semantic similarity with the word embeddings could potentially improve the performance in terms of semantic similarity in specific domains. Thus, in this study we propose a novel way of semi-supervised ontology population through word embeddings and domain specific semantic similarity as the basis. We built several models including traditional benchmark models and new types of models which are based on word embeddings. Finally, we ensemble them together to come up with a synergistic model which outperformed the candidate models by 33\% in comparison to the best performed candidate model.