RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project Explainable AI Team

Team Director: Hitomi Yanaka (D.Eng.)

Japanese Page

Research Summary

Humans perform various inference from given information and make decisions in everyday life. Recently, large language model research using massive data and deep learning has accelerated, and interactive decision-making support using AI has become a reality. However, it is challenging to explain how current AI understands input meaning and performs inference. Toward truly reliable AI, it is necessary to solve the problems of explainable AI from multifaceted perspectives. Based on interdisciplinary approaches of the humanities and sciences, our team aims to elucidate the meaning acquisition and inference processes of AI and realize explainable AI that provide explanations that support humans.

Main Research Fields

Informatics

Related Research Fields

Complex Systems
Humanities
Intelligent Informatics

Keywords

Computational Linguistics
Natural Language Processing
Inference
Explainability
Interpretability

Selected Publications

Papers with an asterisk(*) are based on research conducted outside of RIKEN.

1. *Kumon, R. and Yanaka, H.
"Analyzing the Inner Workings of Transformer in Compositional Generalization"
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL2025), 2025.
2. *Kojima, T., Okimura, I., Iwasawa, Y., Yanaka, H., and Matsuo, Y.
"On the Multilingual Ability of Decoder-based Pre-trained Language Models: Finding and Controlling Language-Specific Neurons"
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL2024), pp. 6919–6971, 2024.
3. *Matsuoka, D., Bekki, D., and Yanaka, H.
"A Propositions-as-types Approach to the Generalized Crossover Effect"
Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 29 (SuB29), volume 1, 2024.
4. *Kumon, R., Matsuoka, D., and Yanaka, H.
"Evaluating Structural Generalization in Neural Machine Translation"
indings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL2024), pp. 13220–13239, 2024.
5. Yanaka, H. and Mineshima, K.
"Compositional Evaluation on Japanese Textual Entailment and Similarity"
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), Volume 10, pp. 1266–1284, 2022.
6. Yanaka, H., Mineshima, K., and Inui, K.
"SyGNS: A Systematic Generalization Testbed Based on Natural Language Semantics"
Findings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP2021), pp. 103–119, 2021.
7. Yanaka, H., Mineshima, K., and Inui, K.
"Exploring Transitivity in Neural NLI Models through Veridicality"
Proceedings of the 16th conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL2021), pp. 920-934, 2021.
8. 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 (ACL2020), pp. 6105-6117, 2020.
9. *Yanaka, H., Mineshima, K., Martinez-Gomez, P., and Bekki, D.
"Acquisition of Phrase Correspondences using Natural Deduction Proofs"
Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT2018), pp. 756–766, 2018.
10. *Yanaka, H., Mineshima, K., Martinez-Gomez, P., and Bekki, D.
"Determining Semantic Textual Similarity using Natural Deduction Proofs"
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP2017), pp. 6105–6117, 2017.

Lab Members

Principal investigator

Hitomi Yanaka: Team Director

Careers

Position	Deadline
Seeking a Research Scientist or a Postdoctoral Researcher (25-530)	Open until filled

Contact Information

Science Building #7,
7-3-1, Hongo,
Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo,
113-8656, Japan
Email: hitomi.yanaka@riken.jp