Hi, I'm a Natural Language Processing researcher. I was recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where I also obtained my PhD in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, School of Informatics, under the supervision of Ewan Klein, Charles Sutton and Maria Liakata. I was based at the Alan Turing Institute in London for a year.
Currently the focus of my research is on automating the process of crafting Systematic Reviews. My PhD research dealt with recommending relevant citations to the author of an academic paper. Like others before, I framed this task as an Information Retrieval scenario but investigated the applicability to the task of two scientific discourse annotation schemes, CoreSC and Argumentative Zoning.
I am always interested in all areas of NLP and AI, and my MSc dissertation was on Natural Language Generation for the Semantic Web (Linked Data).
Publications
- Ben Krause, Marco Damonte, Mihai Dobre, Daniel Duma, Joachim Fainberg, Federico Fancellu, Emmanuel Kahembwe, Jianpeng Cheng, and Bonnie Webber. 2017. Edina: Building an Open Domain Socialbot with Self-dialogues.. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.09816 (2017). [link]
- Daniel Duma, Maria Liakata, James Ravenscroft, Amanda Clare and Ewan Klein. 2016. Rhetorical Classification of Anchor Text for Citation Recommendation. In D-Lib Magazine. [link] [pdf] [slides]
- Daniel Duma, Charles Sutton and Ewan Klein. 2016. Context Matters: Towards Extracting a Citation’s Context Using Linguistic Features. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2016). [paper] [poster]
- Daniel Duma, Maria Liakata, James Ravenscroft, Amanda Clare and Ewan Klein. 2016. Applying CoreSC to context-based citation recommendation. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2016), 23-28 May 2016, Portorož (Slovenia) . [paper] [poster]
- Daniel Duma and Ewan Klein. 2014. Citation Resolution: A method for evaluating context-based citation recommendation systems In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'14). [paper]. [slides]
- Daniel Duma and Ewan Klein. 2013. Generating Natural Language from Linked Data: Unsupervised template extraction . In Proceedings of the International Conference of Computational Semantics IWCS'13. [paper]
- Daniel Duma. 2012. Natural Language Generation for the Semantic Web: Unsupervised Template Extraction . MSc Dissertation (distinction), University of Edinburgh. [dissertation]
Startups and projects
With Scholarly (Scholarly Software Ltd, formerly www.scholarlyessay.com) we were aiming to create automated copy-editing software for academic writing: software that would tell you what to cut and how to reword it to fit the word limit, who to cite based on what you are saying, how to better structure your paragraphs, etc. We received investment and went through the 3-month Dotforge accelerator programme, and failed to raise sufficient funding with some 300 users. I wore many hats at Scholarly, including CEO and main product/UI designer, but I also wrote many lines of Python and Javascript.
Beacon (www.wearbeacon.com) is all about personalization. We set out to make a wearable, flexible, breathable screen that you can put on any fabric. We started with a t-shirt, of which we made several prototypes and we reached the semi-finals of the Intel Make it Wearable competition and received some seed funding from the University of Edinburgh. Eventually we dropped the effort just ahead of our kickstarter when the whole team decided we had PhDs we should better get on with. I was also CEO, product designer and lead programmer on this effort, mostly for the device firmware (Wiring/C/C++) but also for the Android app (Java).
CV / Résumé
Education
| 2013 – 2019 | PhD in Natural Language Processing & Information Retrieval (University of Edinburgh) |
| 2011 – 2012 | MSc Speech and Language Processing (Distinction) (University of Edinburgh) |
| 2005 – 2010 | BA Linguistics & English Studies (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) |
| July 2009 | Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) - Pass B (Westminster Kingsway College, London) |
| 2008 – 2009 | Full year visiting student, Goldsmiths College, University of London: 10 months (Erasmus scholarship) |
Work
| Apr – Nov 2019 | University of Edinburgh — Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Edinburgh, UK. |
| Jan 2017 | Filament Consulting Group — Machine Learning Consultant. London, UK. |
| Sep – Dec 2017 | Amazon Alexa – Applied Scientist Intern. (Evi Technologies). Cambridge, UK. |
| June – Sept 2017 | Google – Software Engineering Intern. Mountain View, California. |
| May – Sept 2015 | Google – Software Engineering Intern. Zurich, Switzerland. |
| 2013, 2014 | University of Edinburgh – Teaching Assistant, Marker, Demonstrator |
| Apr – Dec 2013 | Scholarly Software Ltd. – Co-founder and Director. |
| 2010 – 2011 | Eton College – Spanish Assistant Teacher. Windsor, UK. |
| 2009 – 2010 | Erasmus Student Network UAM – Committee member in charge of Internal Relations. Madrid, Spain. |
| Sept 2006 – Feb 2007 | Spanish Army Central Headquarters – Delphi Programmer. Madrid, Spain. |
| Jan – Dec 2005 | Sun Microsystems – Marketing Support Technician. Madrid, Spain. |
Invited talks:
- 04/05/2017: South England NLP Meetup @ UCL Machine Reading Group. "How to train your chatbot: Learnings from the Alexa Prize" [slides]
- 11/11/2016: Computer Lab Seminar @ University of Cambridge. "Recommending relevant citations using CoreSC and Argumentative Zoning" [slides]
- 18/10/2016: GREYC Seminar @ Université de Caen en Normandie. "Recommending relevant citations using CoreSC and Argumentative Zoning"
- 04/03/2015: SNACK Club @ University of Edinburgh. "Peak Oil: The end of the world as we know it... and are we there yet?" [slides]
- 07/02/2015: DataHack @ University of Edinburgh. "Sentiment analysis: What is it, who cares, and how do you go about it?" [slides]
- 13/03/2014: Open Data Edinburgh. "What do Members of the Scottish Parliament talk about?" [slides]
- 26/02/2014: Student Tech Meetup Edinburgh. "Generating Natural Language from Linked Data: Unsupervised template extraction"
Other academic things
Programme Committee: COLING 2016, WebNLG 2016, AAAI 2017, SWM 2017, WOSP 2017, WOSP 2018 Teaching:
- 2013 – 2014: Agent-Based Systems: TA, marker, lab tutor
- 2014 – 2015: AI Large Practical: demonstrator