Dr Yulan He

I joined the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University, UK, as a Senior Lecturer in 2013. I previously held the positions of Senior Lecturer at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, Lecturer at the University of Exeter, Lecturer at the University of Reading, and Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

I obtained my BASc (First Class Honours) and MEng degrees in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and my PhD degree in spoken language understanding from Cambridge University under the supervision of Prof. Steve Young.

For more information about me, please visit my personal website.

Qualifications & Education

• Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practices, University of Reading
• PhD in Spoken Language Understanding, University of Cambridge
• MEng in Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• BASc with First Class Honours in Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Research interests

My main interests are in social media analysis; sentiment analysis and opinion mining; business intelligence and data mining; text mining; machine learning; and bioinformatics.

Some of my interested research topics include:

• Social media analysis. Integration of machine learning and natural language processing techniques to analyse social media contents and online user behaviours.
• Sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Application of machine learning techniques to extract and understand sentiments and opinions expressed on the Web.
• Biomedical literature mining. Knowledge acquisition from biomedical literature. In particular, investigation of statistical models for biomedical events extraction from textural data.
• Business intelligence and data mining. Investigation of data mining techniques such as classification, clustering, regression, association rule mining, etc., on business problems.

Research Funding (since 2010)

• EPSRC-DSTL, Real-Time Detection of Violence and Extremism from Social Media, (2012 - 2013), £113,92, Principal investigator.
• EC-FP7, ROBUST: Risk and Opportunity management of huge-scale BUSiness communiTy cooperation (2010 - 2013), €542,700, Co-investigator.
• Natural Science Foundation of China, Open Information Extraction using Weakly-Supervised Learning from Abstract Annotations (Jan 2012 - Dec 2014), CNY250,000, Co-investigator.
• Visiting Scholar Scheme by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Opinion Diffusion Analysis from the Social Web (Jul-Aug 2012), CNY80,000, Principal investigator.
• Open University Social Learn, Exploratory Dialogues Detection in Learning Analytics (Apr-Jun 2012), £4,500, Principal investigator.
• Royal Academy of Engineering, Seizing the Predictive Power of Online Communities (Aug 2011), £3,000, Principal investigator, visit the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

PhD Supervision

Current

• Sentiment role labeling using deep learning networks, Trung Hyung, part-time, 2013 – present, external supervisor.
• Twitter sentiment analysis, Hassan Saif, full-time, 2010 – present, external supervisor.
• Online community analysis, Gregoir Burel, full-time, 2010 – present, external supervisor.

Completed

• Probabilistic topic models for sentiment analysis on the Web, Chenghua Lin, 2009 – 2012, now Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen.
• Extracting protein and gene interactions from biomedical literature, Deyu Zhou, 2005 – 2008, now Associate Professor at the Southeast University, China.

Membership of Professional Bodies

• Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Book and Book Chapters:

• C. Lin and Y. He. Sentiment Analysis in Social Media, Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining, edited by R.S. Alhajj and J.G. Rokne, Springer, to appear.
• C. Gurrin, Y. He, G. Kazai, U. Kruschwitz, S. Little, T. Roelleke, S. Rueger, and C.J. van Rijsbergen. Proceedings of the 32nd European Conference on Information Retrieval, Springer-Verlag, 2010.
• D. Zhou and Y. He. From Biomedical Literature to Knowledge: Information Extraction for Protein-Protein Interactions, Computational Intelligence in Biology, edited by T.G. Smolinski, M.M. Milanova, and A.-E. Hassanien, Springer-Verlag, 2008.

Journal Papers:

• J. Wang, X. Zhao, Y. He and X. Li. Infer User Interests via Link Structure Regularisation, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, to appear.
  
• Y. He, C. Lin, W. Gao and K.F. Wong. Tracking Sentiment and Topic Dynamics from Social Media, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, to appear.
• Y. He. Incorporating Sentiment Prior Knowledge for Weakly-Supervised Sentiment Analysis, ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 101-120, 2012.
• C. Lin, Y. He, and R. Everson. Weakly-supervised Joint Sentiment-Topic Detection from Text, IEEE Transaction for Data and Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 1134-1145, 2012. 
• D. Zhou and Y. He. Knowledge integration for analyzing ChIP-seq. Advanced materials research, Vol. 532-533 , pp. 1344-1348, 2012.
• Y. He and D. Zhou. Self-Training from Labeled Features for Sentiment Analysis, Information Processing & Management, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 606-616, 2011.
• D. Zhou and Y. He. Biomedical Events Extraction using the Hidden Vector State Model, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Vol. 53, No. 3, pp. 205-13, 2011.
• B.Q. Vuong, Y. He and S.C. Hui. Towards a Web-based Progressive Handwriting Recognition Environment for Mathematical Problem Solving, Expert Systems with Applications, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 886 - 893, 2010. 
• Y. He and S.C. Hui. Exploring Ant-Based Algorithms for Gene Expression Data Analysis, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 105-119, 2009.
• S. Moran, Y. He and K. Liu. Choosing the Best Bayesian Classifier: An Empirical Study, IAENG International Journal of Computer Science, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 322-331, 2009.
• Y. He, S.C. Hui and T.T. Quan. Automatic Summary Assessment for Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Computers & Education, Vol. 53, No. 3, pp. 890-899, 2009. 
• D. Zhou and Y. He. Discriminative Training of the Hidden Vector State Model for Semantic Parsing, IEEE Transaction for Data and Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 66-77, 2009.
• B.Q. Vuong, S.C. Hui and Y. He. Progressive Structural Analysis for Dynamic Recognition of On-Line Handwritten Mathematical Expressions, Pattern Recognition Letters, Vol 29, pp. 647-655, 2008.
• D. Zhou and Y. He. Extracting Interactions between Proteins from the Literature, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 393-407, 2008.
• D. Zhou, Y. He and C.K. Kwoh. Extracting Protein-Protein Interactions from the Literature using the Hidden Vector State Model, International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2008.

Conference Papers:

• Z. Wei, J. Chen, W. Gao, B. Li, L. Zhou, Y. He, K.F. Wong. An Empirical Study on Uncertainty Identification in Social Media Context, The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Sofia, Bulgaria, August, 2013.
  
• X. Zhao, Y. Guo, R. Yan, Y. He. Timeline Generation with Social Attention, The 36th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR), Dublin, Ireland, July, 2013.
  
• G. Burel and Y. He. A Question of Complexity – Measuring the Maturity of Online Enquiry Communities, The 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HyperText), Paris, France, May, 2013.
  
• A.E. Cano, A. Varga, M. Rowe, F. Ciravegna and Y. He. Harnessing Linked Knowledge Sources for Topic Classification in Social Media,The 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HyperText), Paris, France, May, 2013.
  
• Z. Wei, Y. He, W. Gao, B. Li, L. Zhou and K.F. Wong. Mainstream Media Behaviour Analysis on Twitter: A Case Study Using UK General Election, The 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HyperText), Paris, France, May, 2013.
  
• R. Ferguson, Z. Wei, Y. He and S.B. Shum. An Evaluation of Learning Analytics to Identify Exploratory Dialogue in Online Discussions. The 3rd ACM International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK), Leuven, Belgium, Apr. 2013.
  
• Z. Wei, Y. He, S.B. Shum, R. Ferguson, W. Gao and K.F. Wong. A Self-Training Framework for Automatic Identification of Exploratory Dialogue. The 14th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLing), Samos, Greece, Mar. 2013.
• C. Lin and Y. He. Feature LDA: a Supervised Topic Model for Semantic Web Services Detection, The 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Boston, US, Nov. 2012.
• H. Saif, Y. He and H. Alani. Semantic-Enabled Sentiment Analysis from Twitter, The 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Boston, US, Nov. 2012.
• Y. He, C. Lin, and E. Cano. Online Sentiment and Topic Dynamics Tracking over the Stream- ing Data, IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Sep. 2012.
• Y. He, C. Lin, W. Gao, and K.F. Wong. Tracking Sentiment and Topic Dynamics from Social Media, The 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Dublin, Ireland, Jun. 2012.
• G. Burel, Y. He, and H. Alani. Automatic Identification of Best Answers in Online Enquiry Communities, The 9th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Crete, Greece, May 2012.
• Y. He, H. Saif, Z. Wei, and K.F. Wong. Quantizing Opinions for Political Tweets Analysis, The 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Istanbul, Turkey, May 2012.
• C. Lin, Y. He, and R. Everson. Sentence Subjectivity Detection with Weakly-Supervised Learning, The 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), Chiang Mai, Thailand, Nov. 2011. 
• H. Saif, Y. He, and H. Alani. Semantic Smoothing for Twitter Sentiment Analysis, The 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Bonn, Germany, Oct. 2011.
• D. Zhou and Y. He. A Novel Framework of Training Hidden Markov Support Vector Machines from Lightly-Annotated Data, The 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) Glasgow, Scotland, Oct. 2011.
• Y. He and C. Lin. Automatically Extracting Polarity-Bearing Topics for Cross-Domain Sentiment Classification, The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Portland, Oregon, Jun. 2011.
• Y. He. Latent Sentiment Model for Weakly-Supervised Cross-Lingual Sentiment Classification, The 33rd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Dublin, Ireland, 2011. 
• D. Zhou and Y. He. Learning Conditional Random Fields from Unaligned Data for Natural Language Understanding, The 33rd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Dublin, Ireland, 2011. 
• D. Zhou and Y. He. Semantic Parsing for Biomedical Event Extraction, The 9th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS), Oxford, UK, Jan. 2011.
• Y. He. Learning Sentiment Classification Model from Labeled Features, The 19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Toronto, Canada, Oct. 2010.  
• Y. He, H. Alani, and D. Zhou. Exploring English Lexicon Knowledge for Chinese Sentiment Analysis, CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing, Beijing, China, Aug. 2010.
• C. Lin, Y. He, and R. Everson. A Comparative Study of Bayesian Models for Unsupervised Sentiment Detection, The 14th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), Uppsala, Sweden, Jul. 2010.
• Y. He. Goal Detection from Natural Language Queries, The 15th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB), Cardiff, UK, Jun. 2010.  
• C. Lin and Y. He. Joint Sentiment/Topic Model for Sentiment Analysis, The 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Hong Kong, China, Nov. 2009.  
• S. Moran, Y. He and K. Liu. An Empirical Framework for Selecting the Best Bayesian Classifier, International Conference on Data Mining and Knowledge Engineering, London, UK, Jul. 2009 (Best Student Paper Award).
• Y. He and C. Lin. Protein-Protein Interactions Classification from Text via Local Learning with Class Priors, The 14th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB), Saabrucken, Germany, Jun. 2009.  
• Y. He, S.C. Hui, and T.T. Quan. An Ensemble Approach for Summary Assessment, IEEE International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology, Singapore, Jan. 2009.
• D. Zhou and Y. He. A Hybrid Generative/Discriminative Framework to Train a Semantic Parser from an Un-annotated Corpus, The 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Manchester, UK, Aug. 2008.
• S.C. Hui, Y. He and H. Dong. Text Mining for Chat Message Analysis. IEEE International Conferences on Cybernetics & Intelligent Systems (CIS) and Robotics, Automation & Mechatronics (RAM), Chengdu, China, Jun. 2008.

Workshop Papers:

• Y. He. A Bayesian Modeling Approach to Sentiment Distributions Prediction, Workshop on Issues on Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining co-located with the 18th ACM SIGKDD conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Beijing, China, Aug. 2012.
• H. Saif, Y. He, and H. Alani. Alleviating Data Sparsity for Twitter Sentiment Analysis, Making Sense of Microposts Workshop co-located with the 21st International WWW Conference (WWW), Lyon, France, Apr. 2012.
• C. Wagner, M. Strohmaier and Y. He, Pragmatic metadata matters: How data about the usage of data effects semantic user models, Social Data on the Web Workshop co-located with 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Bonn, Germany, 2011.
• D. Zhou and Y. He. Analyzing ChIP-seq Data based on Multiple Knowledge Sources for Histone Modification, The 8th International Bioinformatics Workshop, Wuhan, China, Jun. 2010.
• Y. He, K. Nakata, and D. Zhou. Ontology-Based Information Extraction from Literature using the Hidden Vector State Model, Workshop on Semantic Aspects in Data Mining in the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Pisa, Italy, Dec. 2008.
• D. Zhou and Y. He. Extracting Protein-Protein Interactions by Discriminative Training of the Hidden Vector State Model, ACL BioNLP Workshop, Columbus, OH, Jun. 2008.