DATE2024.04.17 #Awards & Prizes

Associate Professor Hitomi Yanaka received the 2024 Young Scientist Award from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology

Hitomi Yanaka, Associate Professor

We are pleased to announce that Associate Professor Hitomi Yanaka of the Department of Information Science, Faculty of Science, has received the Young Scientist Award from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology for her "Research on language understanding technology by combining theoretical linguistics and language processing".

Natural language processing technology based on deep learning, including large language models, has made dramatic progress. However, various challenges remain in achieving human-like language understanding, such as the ability to understand logical meanings such as negation, quantity, comparison, and temporal relations, as well as the compositional generalization capacity to understand the meaning of sentences.

Associate Professor Hitomi Yanaka is engaged in research that combines the findings of theoretical linguistics and natural language processing, with the aim of realizing a more human-like language understanding ability. In her research to date, she has developed a technique for calculating entailment relations and similarities between sentences in a highly interpretable manner using semantic analysis based on the compositional semantics of theoretical linguistics. In addition, in order to systematically analyze the generalization performance of natural language processing techniques based on deep learning, she has constructed evaluation benchmarks that take into account the linguistic properties of Japanese and English based on the findings of theoretical linguistics. These research results are highly acclaimed both in Japan and abroad for their originality in combining results from theoretical linguistics, which attempts to understand the properties of natural language with interpretability, and methods based on deep learning, which realizes highly accurate natural language processing.

Such research improves the reliability and transparency of current natural language processing technologies, such as large language models, and is essential for natural language processing to be used in society. Further research is expected in the future.

The Young Scientists' Prize of the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology 2024
https://www.mext.go.jp/content/20240409-mxt_sinkou02-000035075_2.pdf

(Responsibility: Professor Yusuke Miyao, Department of Information Science)