RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project Natural Language Understanding Team
Team Leader: Kentaro Inui (D.Eng.)
Research Summary

In recent years, research on natural language processing has developed greatly in parallel with the distribution of huge language data and advances in machine learning and deep learning. However, a number of breakthroughs are still necessary for developing artificial intelligence that "understands" a language. At the Natural Language Understanding Team, we will conduct research on fundamental technologies for understanding languages by computers through by creating new tasks for automatic assessment of human language activities, such as reviewing argumentation and descriptive responses in pedagogical contexts. We aim to extend upon the frontier of language processing in both basic research and applied research while collaborating with the Language Information Access Technology Team and other teams in the Generic Technology Research Group.
Main Research Fields
- Informatics
Related Research Fields
- Intelligent Informatics
- Complex Systems
- Social Sciences
Keywords
- Natural Language Processing
- Understanding with Knowledge and Inference
- Language Processing for Education
Selected Publications
- 1.
Inoue, N., Stenetorp, P., and Inui, K.:
"R4C: A Benchmark for Evaluating RC Systems to Get the Right Answer for the Right Reason"
"Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp.6740-6750 (2020). - 2.
Ouchi, H., Suzuki, J., Kobayashi, S., Yokoi, S., Kuribayashi, T., Konno, R., and Inui, K.:
"Instance-Based Learning of Span Representations: A Case Study through Named Entity Recognition"
"Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp.6452–6459 (2020). - 3.
Kaneko, M., Mita, M., Kiyono, S., Suzuki, J., and Inui, K.:
"Encoder-Decoder Models Can Benefit from Pre-trained Masked Language Models in Grammatical Error Correction"
"Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp.4248–4254 (2020). - 4.
Yanaka, H., Mineshima, K., Bekki, D., and Inui, K.:
"Do Neural Models Learn Systematicity of Monotonicity Inference in Natural Language?"
"Proceedings of the 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp.6105–6117 (2020). - 5.
Nagata, R., Inui, K., and Ishikawa, S.:
"Creating Corpora for Research in Feedback Comment Generation"
"Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), pp.340–345 (2020). - 6.
Sugawara, S., Stenetorp, P., Inui, K., and Aizawa, A.:
"Assessing the Benchmarking Capacity of Machine Reading Comprehension Datasets"
"Proceedings of the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp.8918-8927 (2020). - 7.
Kiyono, S., Suzuki, J., Mita, M., Mizumoto, T., and Inui, K.:
"An Empirical Study of Incorporating Pseudo Data into Grammatical Error Correction"
"Proceedings of 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pp.1236-1242 (2019). - 8.
Mizumoto, T., Ouchi, H., Isobe, Y., Reisert, P., Nagata, R., Sekine, S., and Inui, K.:
"Analytic Score Prediction and Justification Identification in Automated Short Answer Scoring"
"Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA), pp.316-325 (2019). - 9.
Reisert, P., Vallejo, G., Inoue, N., Gurevych, I., and Inui, K.:
"An Annotation Protocol for Collecting User-Generated Counter-Arguments Using Crowdsourcing"
"Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), pp.232-236 (2019). - 10.
Mita, M., Mizumoto, T., Kaneko, M., Nagata, R., and Inui, K.:
"Cross-Corpora Evaluation and Analysis of Grammatical Error Correction Models — Is Single-Corpus Evaluation Enough?"
"Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), Volume 1, pp.1309-1314 (2019).
Related Links
Lab Members
Principal investigator
- Kentaro Inui
- Team Leader
Core members
- Benjamin Tobias Heinzerling
- Deputy Team Leader
- Masaya Taniguchi
- Special Postdoctoral Researcher
- Jungmin Choi
- Postdoctoral Researcher
- Ying Zhang
- Postdoctoral Researcher
- Yoriko Isobe
- Technical Staff I
- Mayumi Sugawara
- Technical Staff I
- Ana Brassard
- Technical Staff I
- Shota Sasaki
- Visiting Scientist
- Jun Suzuki
- Visiting Scientist
- Manabu Okumura
- Visiting Scientist
- Ryo Nagata
- Visiting Scientist
- Pontus Lars Erik Saito Stenetorp
- Visiting Scientist
- Reina Akama
- Visiting Scientist
- Akira Murakami
- Visiting Scientist
- Yutaka Ishii
- Visiting Scientist
- Naoya Inoue
- Visiting Scientist
- Chihiro Nakagawa
- Visiting Scientist
- Masato Mita
- Visiting Scientist
- Keisuke Sakaguchi
- Visiting Scientist
- Hitomi Yanaka
- Visiting Scientist
- Yuichiro Matsubayashi
- Visiting Scientist
- Manabu Kimura
- Visiting Scientist
- Itsumi Saito
- Visiting Scientist
- Tatsuya Hiraoka
- Visiting Scientist
- Ryoko Tokuhisa
- Visiting Scientist
- Machi Shimmei
- Visiting Scientist
- Yusaku Nishimiya
- Student Trainee
- Ahmed Oumar
- Research Fellow
- Munachiso Nwadike
- Research Fellow
- Hiroaki Funayama
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Yuya Asazuma
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Goro Kobayashi
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Kaori Abe
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Masaki Sakata
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Wenzhi Wang
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Kazuma Kokuta
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Keito Kudo
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Tomoki Ariyama
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Steven Coyne
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Yoichi Takahashi
- Research Part-time Worker I
- Yuya Iwase
- Research Part-time Worker II
- Naoki Miura
- Research Part-time Worker II
- Momoka Furuhashi
- Research Part-time Worker II
Contact Information
c/o Tohoku University
6-3-09, Aoba, Aramaki, Aoba-ku,
Sendai, Miyagi 980-8579, Japan
Tel: +81-(0)22-795-7091
Fax: +81-(0)22-795-4285
Email: kentaro.inui [at] riken.jp