Work Experience
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Feb. 2015 - Present: Software Engineer - Duolingo, Inc. (in Pittsburgh, PA)
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Oct. 2010 - Feb. 2015: Lead Scientist - Rakuten Institute of Technology (in New York)
- Implemented machine transliteration (NLP2011 paper award) and machine translation for e-commerce
- Built Chinese/Japanese word segmentation, morphological analysis, named entity extraction systems
- Lexical knowledge acquisition and information extraction from the Web
- Developed writing support system for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners
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Apr. 2009 - Sep. 2010: Research and Development Engineer - Baidu Japan, Inc. (worked in Shanghai / Beijing / Tokyo)
- Planned and acted as a lead developer in various projects including Unnatural language processing contest and Baidu Mobile Corpus and Timed Corpus.
- Worked on the ranking and page analytical algorithms including spam detection for Baidu mobile search. Also worked on the mobile emoticon search using various NLP semantic analysis techniques.
- Worked on various NLP topics including - word / sentence analysis technologies, synonym mining and dictionary construction, proper noun detection, Japanese Input Method BaiduType, etc.
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Apr. 2008 - Jul. 2008: Research Intern - Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA. (Mentor: Hisami Suzuki)
- Proposed a state-of-the-art method for Japanese query alteration, which corrects misspellings and normalizes the spelling/transliteration variants, with higher accuracy than previous systems.
- Implemented the system using Visual C#, SQL Server, and Ruby, with tens of gigabytes of query log. This system is being integrated into Microsoft Live Search (http://www.live.com/).
- Developed a method to automatically and efficiently generate query re-writing pairs from session log.
- Presented the project at the 3rd NLP Symposium for Young Researchers and was awarded the outstanding presentation award. Presented at NAACL 2009.
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Nov. 2006 - Aug. 2007: Developer - IPA, JAPAN: Exploratory Software Project. (Project Manager: Prof. David J. Farber)
- Accepted as the Exploratory Software Project "Serendi: A Location-Aware Social Networking Platform," a meta social networking service targeted at mobile devices with GPS. (acceptance ratio 23.4%)
- Developed the "compatibility" analysis module, which recommends users in real time based on natural language processing and network analysis. Used PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, MySQL, and ActiveRecord.
- Conducted an extensive user test with more than 50 users and confirmed the reliability of the system.
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Aug. 2005 - Sep. 2005: Intern (Software Engineer), Google Inc., CA, USA. (Mentors: Dekang Lin and Jun Wu)
- Participated in the two-month internship program, as one of the few interns chosen from Japan, as it was only the second year since the internship program started.
- Improved Japanese query suggestion, which is currently used as the basis for the query suggestion shown at the top and bottom of the Google search result.
- Fully used the parallel distributed computation algorithms such as MapReduce and the large network cluster infrastructure which Google offers.
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Apr. 2006 - Mar. 2007: Research Assistant, Nagoya University
- Proposed and implemented some extension and selection methods of context for lexical similarity computation, to increase the performance of linguistic resources construction such as thesauri.
Education
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Apr. 2006 - Mar. 2009: Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Information Engineering,
- Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Japan.
- Doctoral Thesis: "Modeling and Selection of Context for Better Synonym Acquisition"
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Apr. 2004 - Mar. 2006 : Master's Program in Department of Information Engineering,
- Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Japan
- Skipped a year in undergraduate and admitted to the graduate school based on the grade-skipping system due to the excellent academic performance. Overall GPA: 3.8
- Master's Thesis: "Utilization of Probabilistic Latent Semantics for Automatic Thesaurus Construction"
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Apr. 2001 - Mar. 2004 : Information Engineering Course, School of Engineering,
- Nagoya University, Japan. Computer Science GPA: 3.9
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May. 2014: Artificial Intelligence (CS188x; provided by Pieter Abbeel (UC Berkeley) on edX)
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Dec. 2012: Probabilistic Graphical Model (provided by Daphne Koller (Stanford University) on Coursera)
- Score: 92.8% (with distinction)
Awards & Professional Activities
- Invited talk at CUNY NLP Seminar (hosted by Prof. Heng Ji) Title: Word Segmentation and Transliteration in Chinese and Japanese, April 2013. slides
- 2011 Field Innovation Award from the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence: ANPI_NLP: Safety Information Confirmation Support using Natural Language Processing for The 2011 Tohoku Earthquake.
- Paper Award at NLP2011 “Latent Class Transliteration based on Source Language Origins” (the largest Japanese NLP academic conference)
- Invited presentation at IPSJ 2012 “Real-world Natural Language Processing”
- Leading editorial member of a special issue on “UnNatural Language Processing, ” Journal of Natural Language Processing, 2011.
- Panelist at the joint workshop “Relationship between industrial, students, universities, and students in the NLP field” at the 17th Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing
- Best Paper Award at NLP2009 “Semantic Category Extraction from Unsegmented Text using Graph Kernels” (the largest Japanese NLP academic conference, chosen among 235 papers)
- Paper Award at the 3rd NLP Symposium for Young Researchers. Presentation: “A Unified Approach to Japanese Query Alteration based on Semantic Similarity”
- Paper Award at the 22nd IMI Seminar of the 21st Century COE Program. Presentation: “Utilization of Probabilistic Latent Semantics for Automatic Thesaurus Construction”
- Program Committee at SANCL 2012, the Student Research Workshop (SRW) at ACL-IJCNLP 2009 and ACL 2012.
- Program Committee at ACL 2014 (morphology) and COLING 2014 (machine translation).