Dr Thushari Atapattu Mudiyanselage
Grant-Funded Researcher (B)
School of Computer Science and Information Technology
College of Engineering and Information Technology
Eligible to supervise Masters and PhD - email supervisor to discuss availability.
I am the lead and co-founder of Learning Technology for Social Good (LT4SG) research group and a researcher at the Computer Science Education Research Group.My research focuses on better understanding the latent discourse aspects in large corpora of natural language text, and using this understanding to build computational models that can improve human communication process. My research interests lie in the areas of text mining, natural language processing, discourse processing, and educational technology. Some of my recent research projects explores;
- Using linguistic fingerprints to combat cyberbullying,
- Modeling language related to mental health using social media data,
- Impact of teachers’ academic discourse in lecture videos for students’ video engagement in massive classrooms (MOOCs),
- Modeling coginitive engagement and measuring new knowledge construction in online teacher professional development MOOCs
- Language and discourse aspects of learners’ with ‘confused’ state in massive open online courses (MOOCs)
Regardless of the discipline, I am passionate about everything in TEXT, DISCOURSE, LANGUAGE, COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY & MIND :)
| Date | Position | Institution name |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 - ongoing | Lecturer | University of Adelaide |
| 2015 - ongoing | Post-doctoral Research Fellow | University of Adelaide |
| 2010 - 2015 | Software Engineer | Globe Medical |
| Date | Type | Title | Institution Name | Country | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Award | Adelaide Women's Research Excellence Award | University of Adelaide | Australia | $5000 |
| 2015 | Recognition | Dean's Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence | University of Adelaide | Australia | - |
| 2013 | Nomination | Google Anita Borg scholarship | - | - | |
| 2012 | Award | Google PhD Travel Award | - | $2500 | |
| 2011 | Scholarship | University of Adelaide PhD scholarship | University of Adelaide | Australia | - |
| Date | Institution name | Country | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 - 2014 | University of Adelaide | Australia | Doctor of Philosophy |
| 2004 - 2008 | University of Colombo | Sri Lanka | Bachelor of Computer Science (Hons) |
| Year | Citation |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Sridhara, A., Falkner, N., & Atapattu, T. (2023). Leveraging Inference: A Regression-Based Learner Performance Prediction System for Knowledge Tracing. IEEE Access, 11, 123458-123475. Scopus2 WoS2 |
| 2022 | Atapattu, T., Herath, M., Elvitigala, C., de Zoysa, P., Gunawardane, K., Thilakaratne, M., . . . Falkner, K. (2022). EmoMent: An Emotion Annotated Mental Health Corpus from two South Asian Countries. Proceedings - International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING, 29(1), 6991-7001. Scopus6 |
| 2020 | Atapattu, T., Falkner, K., Thilakaratne, M., Sivaneasharajah, L., & Jayashanka, R. (2020). What Do Linguistic Expressions Tell Us about Learners' Confusion? A Domain-independent Analysis in MOOCs. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 13(4), 878-888. Scopus18 WoS13 |
| 2019 | Prana, G. A. A., Treude, C., Thung, F., Atapattu, T., & Lo, D. (2019). Categorizing the Content of GitHub README Files. Empirical Software Engineering, 34(3), 1296-1327. Scopus94 WoS78 |
| 2019 | Atapattu, T., Thilakaratne, M., Vivian, R., & Falkner, K. (2019). Detecting cognitive engagement using word embeddings within an online teacher professional development community. Computers and Education, 140, 14 pages. Scopus54 WoS42 |
| 2019 | Thilakaratne, M., Falkner, K., & Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T. (2019). A systematic review on literature-based discovery workflow. PEERJ COMPUTER SCIENCE, 5, 40 pages. Scopus33 WoS30 Europe PMC13 |
| 2019 | Thilakaratne, M., Falkner, K., & Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T. (2019). A systematic review on literature-based discovery: General overview, methodology, & statistical analysis. ACM Computing Surveys, 52(6), 34 pages. Scopus45 WoS32 |
| 2018 | Atapattu, T., & Falkner, K. (2018). Impact of Lecturer's Discourse for Student Video Interactions: Video Learning Analytics Case Study of MOOCs. JOURNAL OF LEARNING ANALYTICS, 5(3), 182-197. WoS23 |
| 2017 | Atapattu, T., Falkner, K., & Falkner, N. (2017). A comprehensive text analysis of lecture slides to generate concept maps. Computers and Education, 115, 96-113. Scopus63 WoS49 |
| Year | Citation |
|---|---|
| 2025 | Atapattu, T., Thilakaratne, M., Do, D. N., Herath, M., & Falkner, K. E. (2025). Exploring the Role of Mental Health Conversational Agents in Training Medical Students and Professionals: A Systematic Literature Review.. In W. Che, J. Nabende, E. Shutova, & M. T. Pilehvar (Eds.), ACL (Findings) (pp. 20785-20798). Association for Computational Linguistics. |
| 2024 | Mahdi, M. D., Atapattu, T., & Thilakaratne, M. (2024). Advancing Community Directories: Leveraging LLMs for Automated Extraction in MARC Standard Venue Availability Notes. In ALTA 2024 - Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association (pp. 118-129). Canberra: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). |
| 2024 | Mahdi, M. D., Atapattu, T., & Thilakaratne, M. (2024). Advancing Community Directories: Leveraging LLMs for Automated Extraction in MARC Standard Venue Availability Notes. In Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop Vol. 22 (pp. 118-129). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Language Technology Association. |
| 2021 | Atapattu, T., Herath, M., Zhang, G., & Falkner, K. (2021). Automated Detection of Cyberbullying AgainstWomen and Immigrants and Cross-domain Adaptability. In Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop Vol. 18. Virtual, Online: Australasian Language Technology Association. |
| 2020 | Thilakaratne, M., Falkner, K., & Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T. (2020). Connecting the Dots: Hypotheses Generation by Leveraging Semantic Shifts. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) Vol. 12085 LNAI (pp. 328-340). Switzerland: Springer. DOI Scopus1 WoS1 |
| 2020 | Treude, C., Middleton, J., & Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T. (2020). Beyond accuracy: Assessing software documentation quality. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2020) (pp. 1509-1512). New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). DOI Scopus23 WoS19 |
| 2020 | Thilakaratne, K., Falkner, K., & Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T. (2020). Information extraction in digital libraries: First steps towards portability of lbdworkflow. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) (pp. 345-348). online: ACM. DOI Scopus2 |
| 2020 | Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T., Falkner, K., & Thilakaratne, K. (2020). Garbage in, garbage out? an empirical look at information richness of lbd input types. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) (pp. 369-372). online: ACM. DOI |
| 2020 | Herath, M., Atapattu, T., Dung, H. A., Treude, C., & Falkner, K. (2020). AdelaideCyC at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Ensemble of Classifiers for Offensive Language Detection in Social Media. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (pp. 1516-1523). Barcelona, Spain (online): ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL. DOI Scopus4 WoS2 |
| 2020 | Sivaneasharajah, L., Atapattu, T., & Falkner, K. (2020). Linguistic Changes across Different User Roles in Online Learning Environment. What do they tell us?. In A. N. Rafferty, J. Whitehill, C. Romero, & V. Cavalli-Sforza (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2020) (pp. 667-671). Montreal, Canada: International Educational Data Mining Society. |
| 2020 | Sivaneasharajah, L., Falkner, K., & Atapattu, T. (2020). Investigating Students’ Learning in Online Learning Environment. In A. N. Rafferty, J. Whitehill, C. Romero, & V. Cavalli-Sforza (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, EDM 2020 (pp. 806-809). Online: Institute of Education Sciences. Scopus1 |
| 2018 | Thilakaratne, M., Falkner, K., & Atapattu, T. (2018). Automatic detection of cross-disciplinary knowledge associations. In ACL 2018 - 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop (pp. 45-51). online: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI Scopus6 |
| 2017 | Atapattu, T., & Falkner, K. (2017). Discourse analysis to improve the effective engagement of MOOC videos. In ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (pp. 580-581). online: ACM. DOI Scopus11 WoS8 |
| 2016 | Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T., & Falkner, K. (2016). A framework for topic generation and labeling from MOOC discussions. In Proceedings of the Third (2016) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (pp. 201-204). NY, USA: ACM New York. DOI Scopus22 WoS19 |
| 2016 | Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T., Falkner, K., & Tarmazdi, H. (2016). Topic-wise classification of MOOC discussions: a visual analytics approach. In T. Barnes, M. Chi, & M. Feng (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (pp. 276-281). Raleigh, NC, USA: IEDMS. Scopus28 |
| 2015 | Atapattu, T., Falkner, K., & Falkner, N. (2015). Educational question answering motivated by question-specific concept maps. In C. Conati, N. Heffernan, A. Mitrovic, & M. Verdejo (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education, 17th International Conference, AIED 2015 Vol. 9112 (pp. 13-22). Madrid, Spain: Springer. DOI Scopus8 WoS10 |
| 2015 | Atapattu, T., Falkner, K., & Falkner, N. (2015). Task-adapted concept map scaffolding to support quizzes in an online environment. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 2015-June (pp. 272-277). Vilnius, Lithuania: Association for Computing Machinery. DOI Scopus1 WoS1 |
| 2015 | Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T., Falkner, K., & Falkner, N. (2015). An evaluation methodology for concept maps mined from lecture notes: an educational perspective. In S. Zvacek, M. Restivo, J. Uhomoibhi, & M. Helfert (Eds.), Communications in Computer and Information Science Vol. 510 (pp. 68-83). Barcelona, Spain: Springer International Publishing. DOI Scopus1 WoS1 |
| 2014 | Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T., Falkner, K., & Falkner, N. (2014). Evaluation of concept importance in concept maps mined from lecture notes: computer vs human. In S. Zvacek, M. Restivo, J. Uhomoibhi, & M. Helfert (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education Vol. 2 (pp. 75-84). Barcelona, Spain: SciTePress. DOI Scopus9 |
| 2014 | Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T., Falkner, K., & Falkner, N. (2014). Acquisition of triples of knowledge from lecture notes: a natural language processing approach. In Stamper, J., Pardos, Z., & M. Mavrikis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (pp. 193-196). London, United Kingdom: International Educational Data Mining Society (IEDMS). |
| 2012 | Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T., Falkner, K., & Falkner, N. (2012). Automated extraction of semantic concepts from semi-structured data: supporting computer-based education through the analysis of lecture notes. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2012 Vol. 7446 LNCS (pp. 161-175). Germany: Springer-Verlag. DOI Scopus8 |
| 2009 | Atapattu, T., & De Zoysa, K. (2009). v-Learning: Using voice for distant learning in emerging regions. In Csedu 2009 Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Computer Supported Education Vol. 1 (pp. 217-222). |
| Year | Citation |
|---|---|
| 2012 | Atapattu, T. (2012). Automated generation of practice questions from semistructured lecture notes. Poster session presented at the meeting of Icer 12 Proceedings of the 9th Annual International Conference on International Computing Education Research. ACM. DOI |
T. Atapattu. Modeling Human Response Patterns for Generating Mental Health Therapy Dialogues. ECMS Research Transition Scheme, $22,936 (2023-2024)
Wagner, M., Thilakaratne, M., Zhang, W., Treude, C., Arora, C., Atapattu, T. Contextually situated anomaly detection, Defence Innovation Partnership, $100,000 (2021-2022)
T. Atapattu, M. Thilakaratne, De Zoysa, K., Gunawardena, K., Zoysa, P. Mental wellbeing and emotion awareness tool, Australian Academy of Science, $10,000 (2021)
T. Atapattu, M. Thilakaratne. Automated glossary generation for effective and efficient information extraction from COVID-19 scientific articles, Defence Innovation Partnership, $20,000 (2020-2021)
Falkner, K., Vivian, R., Atapattu, T. Cyber security education in K-12, AustCyber (with industry partners Google Aus & NZ and CSIRO), $313,387 (2020-2021)
K. Falkner, R. Vivian, and T. Atapattu, Artificial Intelligence resources to support the Artificial Intelligence in schools initiative, Department of Education & Training, $585,000 (2019)
K. Falkner, R. Vivian and T. Atapattu, AI Professional Development program for K-12 teachers in support of the Digital Technologies Curriculum in Australia, Google Australia & New Zealand, $83,749 (2019).
K. Falkner, R. Vivian and T. Atapattu, Understanding the relationship between social community formation and progression within MOOC environments, Research Contract, Google Australia, $37,687 (2017).
2019 (Semester 2): COMP SCI 1106 - Introduction to Software Engineering
2017 (Semester 1): COMP SCI 7098 - Master of Computing & Innovation Project
2017 (Semester 2): COMP SCI 1106 - Introduction to Software Engineering
| Date | Role | Research Topic | Program | Degree Type | Student Load | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Co-Supervisor | A Framework for Enhancing the Student Experience Through Automated Analysis | Doctor of Philosophy | Doctorate | Full Time | Mr Hamzah Arishi |
| Date | Role | Research Topic | Program | Degree Type | Student Load | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 - 2025 | Co-Supervisor | Developing Language Resources and Advancing AI Techniques for Automatic Detection of Cyberbullying Causes | Doctor of Philosophy | Doctorate | Full Time | Isuru Mahagani Arachchige |
| 2021 - 2025 | Co-Supervisor | Improving MOOCs Through the Development of Automated Tools for Learner Modelling | Doctor of Philosophy | Doctorate | Full Time | Mr Abhilash Sridhara |
| 2018 - 2022 | Co-Supervisor | Investigating Students’ Learning through Learner roles and Linguistic Expressions in Massive Open Online Courses | Doctor of Philosophy | Doctorate | Full Time | Miss Lavendini Sivaneasharajah |
| 2017 - 2021 | Co-Supervisor | In Search of a Common Thread: Enhancing the LBD Workflow with a view to its Widespread Applicability | Doctor of Philosophy | Doctorate | Full Time | Dr Menasha Thilakaratne |
| Date | Role | Membership | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 - ongoing | - | Society for Learning Analytics Research (SOLAR) | - |
| 2014 - ongoing | - | International Educational Data Mining Society (IEDM) | - |
| 2014 - ongoing | Member | International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society (IAIED) | - |
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