Luana Bulat (Făgărășan)

Short biography

I'm a final year PhD student in the Natural Language and Information Processing Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. My advisor is Dr. Stephen Clark and I am funded by the EPSRC.

Before starting my PhD, I completed the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, as well as an undergraduate degree (BSc in Computer Science) at the University of Leicester.

In 2015 I was awarded one of the Women Techmakers scholarships (formerly the Google Anita Borg Scholarship Programme) for the Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) region. The Women Techmakers scholarship is awarded based on academic performance, leadership, and impact on the community of women in tech. Watch my Women Techmakers Youtube interview here.

Selected activities

• Director of Studies in Computer Science, Murray Edwards College , 2019 - present
• Special Supervisor (Teaching By-Fellow) in Computer Science, Newnham College, 2018 - present
• Deputy chair, women@CL, 2016/2017
• Conference co-chair, 2015 Oxbridge Conference for Women in Computer Science, 2015/2016
• Silicon Valley Initiative Director, Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, 2015/2016
• President, Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, 2014/2015

Teaching

I am supervising the following courses (2019/2020 academic year):

• Part IA Discrete Mathematics (Michaelmas, Lent)
• Part IA Machine Learning and Real-world Data (Lent)
• Part IB Formal Models of Language (Easter)

Past courses I've supervised include:

• Part II Natural Language Processing (2013 - 2018)
• Part II Information Retrieval (2014 - 2018)

Publications

Conference and journal papers

• Decoding brain activity associated with literal and metaphoric sentence comprehension using distributional semantic models
  Vesna Djokic, Jean Maillard, Luana Bulat and Ekaterina Shutova
  Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) 2020
  [coming soon]
• Modeling affirmative and negated action processing in the brain with lexical and compositional semantic models
  Vesna Djokic, Jean Maillard, Luana Bulat and Ekaterina Shutova
  Proceedings of ACL 2019, Florence, Italy.
  [paper][bib]
• Deconstructing Multimodality: Visual Properties and Visual Context in Human Semantic Processing
  Christopher Davis, Luana Bulat, Anita Vero and Ekaterina Shutova
  Proceedings of *SEM2019 2019, Minneapolis, USA.
  [paper] [bib]
• Speaking, Seeing, Understanding: Correlating semantic models with conceptual representation in the brain
  Luana Bulat, Stephen Clark and Ekaterina Shutova
  Proceedings of EMNLP 2017, Copenhagen, Denmark.
  [paper] [bib] [talk]
• A Supervised Similarity Network for Metaphor Detection
  Marek Rei, Luana Bulat, Douwe Kiela and Ekaterina Shutova
  Proceedings of EMNLP 2017, Copenhagen, Denmark.
  [paper] [bib] [talk] [code]
• Modelling metaphor with attribute-based semantics
  Luana Bulat, Stephen Clark and Ekaterina Shutova
  Proceedings of EACL 2017, Valencia, Spain.
  [paper] [bib] [poster]
• Learning to Negate Adjectives with Bilinear Models
  Laura Rimell, Amandla Mabona, Luana Bulat and Douwe Kiela
  Proceedings of EACL 2017, Valencia, Spain.
  [paper] [bib]
• Vision and Feature Norms: Improving automatic feature norm learning through cross-modal maps
  Luana Bulat, Douwe Kiela and Stephen Clark
  Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2016, San Diego, CA.
  [paper] [bib] [data] [poster]
• Grounding semantics in olfactory perception
  Douwe Kiela, Luana Bulat and Stephen Clark
  Proceedings of ACL 2015, Beijing, China.
  [paper] [bib] [data]
• From distributional semantics to feature norms: grounding semantic models in human perceptual data
  Luana Făgărășan, Eva Maria Vecchi and Stephen Clark
  Proceedings of the Short Papers of the 11th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2015), London, UK.
  (Also appeared in NIPS Workshop on Learning Semantics 2014, Montreal, Canada.)
  [paper] [bib]
• Reducing Dimensions of Tensors in Type-Driven Distributional Semantics
  Tamara Polajnar, Luana Făgărășan and Stephen Clark
  Proceedings of the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Conference (EMNLP 2014), Doha, Qatar.
  [paper]

Workshop papers

• Modelling Visual Properties and Visual Context in Multimodal Semantics.
  Christopher Davis, Luana Bulat, Anita Vero and Ekaterina Shutova
  Workshop on Visually Grounded Interaction and Language, NIPS 2018, Montreal, Canada
  [paper]
• Virtual Embodiment: A Scalable Long-Term Strategy for Artificial Intelligence Research
  Douwe Kiela, Luana Bulat, Anita Vero and Stephen Clark
  Machine Intelligence Workshop, NIPS 2016, Barcelona, Spain
  [paper]

Contact

Email me: luana.bulat {AT} cl.cam.ac.uk
+44 (0)1223 767024

University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
William Gates Building, 15 JJ Thomson Avenue
Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK