Naoki Otani (大谷直樹)

Research Scientist, Megagon Labs
naoki [at] megagon [dot] ai
CV [pdf], ORCID

Research Interest

In general, I like to start by observing how people use language and finding interesting problems that can lead to a better society. So far, many of my research projects ended up proposing a new task and/or creating a new language resource rather than developing systems that compete well on existing benchmark datasets. I like exploring how linguistic theories and computational models can explain various linguistic phenomena and how external data, particularly structured knowledge, can improve language technologies in an interpretable way.

Education

2019/08 - 2023/05:
Ph.D., LTI, CMU, Advisor: Eduard Hovy.
2017/08 - 2019/08:
MS., LTI, CMU, Advisor: Eduard Hovy.
2015 - 2017:
MS., Kyoto University, Advisor: Sadao Kurohashi.
2011 - 2015:
Undergraduate, Kyoto University, Advisor: Hisashi Kashima.

Work Experience

2023/07 - Present:
Research Scientist, Megagon Labs.
2019/08 - 2023/05:
Research Assistant, Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.
2021/06 - 2021/08:
Internship, Microsoft Research Redmond, Online, Topic: intent-based text representation for to-do management assistance.
2020/06 - 2020/08:
Internship, Robert Bosch LLC, Online, Topic: dialogue response generation using common-sense.
2016/08 - 2016/10:
Internship, Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, Topic: paraphrasing and text normalization, Received Award of Excellence.
2016/02 - 2017/03:
Internship, Yahoo! JAPAN, Tokyo, Topic: GWAP on spoken dialogue systems for knowledge acquisition.
2015/09 - 2015/10:
Internship, Mentor: Akiko Murakami, IBM Research - Tokyo, Tokyo, Topic: abbreviation disambiguation.

Publications

dblp

Journal

Conference

Workshop

Service

  • Co-organizer, The First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Human Resources at EACL 2024.
  • Reviewer
  • Awards