From left, Dr. Takenobu Tokunaga, Dr. Simone Teufel and Dr. Haruo Yokota, Dean of School of Computing

<Field of Specialization>

Computational Linguistics, in particular discourse linguistics, text comprehension and summarization

<Brief introduction of collaborative research and aims at WRHI>

I have collaborated on summarization and discourse analysis with Prof. Tokunaga and members of his research group since 2010, and we have published this work extensively in international high-class journals and conferences. The start of our collaborative work was based on the rhetorical analysis of scientific articles with Tokunaga group’s annotation tool SLATE. This work was performed in the context of linguistic citation analysis, a novel field of study started by Prof. Okumura around the turn of the last century, and continued by researchers in Tokunaga lab and my own group, amongst many others. While our joint research in this area is still ongoing, we have since also worked together on the rhetorical analysis of legal texts in the Japanese language and on observational studies of human summarization behavior using eyetrackers, with the aim of developing better summarization models. Valuable data for these experiments were collected by Prof. Tokunaga and myself in spring 2017 at Cambridge University. During my upcoming research stay at Tokyo Tech WRHI, I am particularly interested in researching human information packing behavior, i.e., the way in which sentences are naturally broken into smaller units and then re-assembled during the writing process. Such studies are closely connected to argumentation mining, summarization and rhetorical analysis, areas that I am expert in.

During my collaboration at the Tokyo Tech WRHI, I will be able to profit from Prof. Tokunaga’s expertise on coreference resolution, eye-tracking, and word-sense disambiguation. Although only a beginner in the Japanese language myself, as a linguist I also have a keen interest in Japanese computational linguistics.

<Collaborative Researcher>

Dr. Takenobu Tokunaga(Professor, School of Computing, Tokyo Tech)