Masato Hagiwara
hagisan@gmail.com
http://masatohagiwara.net/SKILLSNatural language processing and machine/deep learning, with a focus on language education, Asian
language processing, and languages of non-human animals.

EXPERIENCE
Earth Species Project (Berkeley, CA, 2021/11-) — Senior AI Research Scientist●●

Developed AVES, a self-supervised foundation model for animal sounds ("BERT for animals")
Built BEANS, a benchmark for bioacoustics ML models (“GLUE for animals”)

Octanove Labs LLC (Seattle, WA, 2019/02-) — Owner & NLP/ML Engineer and Researcher●●●●

Offered consulting and R&D services for early-to-mid stage startups in the US/Japan on NLP/ML
Worked on educational research with RIKEN (TEASPN, GrammarTagger, GTC) and ACTNext
Built QA and NER systems with Studio Ousia and NMT (JA, EN, and ZH) with Mirai Translate
Built a free, Web-based AllenNLP course in collaboration with with Matt Gardner at Allen AI

Duolingo, Inc. (Pittsburgh, PA, 2015/02-2019/02) — Senior Machine Learning Engineer / Scientist●●●Built automatic grading technologies for Duolingo English Test using neural networks
Led data creation and analysis for various research projects, including user behavior analysis
and second language acquisition modeling (SLAM) shared task
Led the content creation of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean from English courses

Rakuten Institute of Technology (New York, NY, 2010/10-2015/02) — Lead Scientist●●●

Developed machine transliteration (NLP2011 paper award) and machine translation algorithms
for the largest Japanese e-commerce website (Rakuten)
Built a Chinese/Japanese word segmentation / morphological analyzer (RakutenMA)
Developed a writing support system for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners

Baidu Japan, Inc (China & Japan, 2009/04-2010/09) — Research and Development Engineer●●●Improved the ranking and page analysis algorithms including spam detection and emoticon
search for Baidu mobile search
Worked as a consultant on various NLP projects including Japanese Input Method BaiduType
Led NLP data initiatives including Unnatural language processing contest and Baidu mobilecorpus and timed corpus

Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA, 2008/04-2008-07) — Research Intern●●●

Built a state-of-the-art method for Japanese query alteration for spelling correction andspelling/transliteration normalization
Implemented the system using Visual C#, SQL Server, and Ruby, with tens of gigabytes of query
log, which was integrated into Microsoft Live Search
Published a research paper on the query alteration algorithm at NAACL 2009 and at the 3rd
NLP Symposium for Young Researchers (Outstanding Presentation Award)

Google (Mountain View, CA, 2005/08-2005/09) — Software Engineer Intern●●Improved Japanese query suggestion, which is currently used as the basis for the querysuggestion shown at the top and bottom of the Google search result
Ran knowledge extraction algorithms on the distributed computation infrastructure (MapReduceand the Google's large network clusters)

EDUCATION
Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan - Ph.D., Information Engineering (Computer Science)Apr 2006 - Mar 2008

●Doctoral Thesis: "Modeling and Selection of Context for Better Synonym Acquisition"

Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan - Master’s Degree., Information Engineering (ComputerScience)Apr 2004 - Mar 2006●●

Skipped a year in undergraduate due to the excellent academic performance. Overall GPA: 3.8
Master's Thesis: "Utilization of Probabilistic Latent Semantics for Automatic Thesaurus
Construction

Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan - Bachelor's Degree., Information Engineering (ComputerScience)Apr 2001 - Mar 2004●Overall GPA: 3.9

AWARDS AND PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES●●●●●

Invited talk on “Education and AllenNLP” at AllenNLP Summit, 2019
Co-organizer of the Workshop for Natural Language Processing Open Source Software(NLP-OSS), co-located at ACL 2018
Invited keynote at the Optimizing Human Learning workshop co-located with ITS 2018
(Montréal, Canada, June 2018)
Invited talk at CUNY NLP Seminar (hosted by Prof. Heng Ji) Title: Word Segmentation andTransliteration in Chinese and Japanese, April 20132011 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” (thelargest Japanese NLP academic conference)
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

SELECTED PUBLICATIONSBOOKS●●●●●Masato Hagiwra and Paul O'Leary McCann. Introduction to Japanese Natural Language
Processing, 2021.
Masato Hagiwara. Real-World Natural Language Processing. Manning Publications, 2019.
Yoh Okuno, Graham Neubig, Masato Hagiwara, Mamoru Komachi. Natural Language
Processing: Basics and Technology (Shoeisha) (in Japanese). Shoeisha, 2016.
Drew Conway, John Myles White. Masato Hagiwara, Yoh Okuno, Takaaki Mizuno, Tetsuya
Kinoshita (translation). 入門 機械学習 (Machine Learning for Hackers). O'Reilly Japan, 2012.
Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, Edward Loper. Masato Hagiwara, Takahiro Nakayama, Takaaki Mizuno.
入門 自然言語処理 (Natural Language Processing with Python). O'Reilly Japan, 2010.

JOURNAL PAPERS●●●●Burr Settles, Geoffrey T. LaFlair and Masato Hagiwara. Machine Learning-Driven LanguageAssessment. Trans. of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 8, p.247-263, 2020.
Masato Hagiwara, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Katsuhiko Toyama. Supervised Synonym Acquisition Using
Distributional Features and Syntactic Patterns. J. of NLP, Vol. 16, Num. 2, pp. 59-83, 2009.
Masato Hagiwara, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Katsuhiko Toyama. A Comparative Study on Effective
Context Selection for Distributional Similarity. J. of NLP, Vol. 5, Num. 5, pp. 119-150, 2008.
Masato Hagiwara, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Katsuhiko Toyama. Effective Use of Indirect Dependency forDistributional Similarity. J. of NLP, Vol. 15, Num. 4, pp. 19-42, 2008.

CONFERENCE PAPERS
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Masato Hagiwara. AVES: Animal Vocalization Encoder based on Self-Supervision. ICASSP 2023.
Masato Hagiwara, Benjamin Hoffman, Jen-Yu Liu, Maddie Cusimano, Felix Effenberger, KatieZacarian. BEANS: The Benchmark of Animal Sounds. ICASSP 2023.
Yoshinari Fujinuma, Masato Hagiwara. Semi-Supervised Joint Estimation of Word and Document
Readability. TextGraphs-15, 2021.
Masato Hagiwara, Takumi Ito, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Jun Suzuki and Kentaro Inui. TEASPN:
Framework and Protocol for Integrated Writing Assistance Environments. EMNLP (systemdemonstrations), 2019.
Burr Settles, Chris Brust, Erin Gustafson, Masato Hagiwara, Nitin Madnani. Second Language
Acquisition Modeling. BEA 2018, 2018.
Ayah Zirikly, Masato Hagiwara. Cross-lingual Transfer of Named Entity Recognizers withoutParallel Corpora. ACL 2015, pp. 390-396, 2015.

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Masato Hagiwara, Satoshi Sekine. Lightweight Client-Side Chinese/Japanese MorphologicalAnalyzer Based on Online Learning. COLING 2014 system demonstration, pp. 39-43, 2014.
Haibo Li, Masato Hagiwara, Qi Li, Heng Ji. Comparison of the Impact of Word Segmentation onName Tagging for Chinese and Japanese, LREC 2014, pp.2532-2536, 2014.
Masato Hagiwara, Satoshi Sekine. Accurate Word Segmentation using Transliteration andLanguage Model Projection, ACL 2013, pp 183-189.
Masato Hagiwara, Soh Masuko. KooSHO: Japanese Text Input Environment based on Aerial
Hand Writing. NAACL/HLT 2013, demo session, pp. 24-27. 2013.
Yuta Hayashibe, Masato Hagiwara, Satoshi Sekine. phloat : Integrated Writing Environment for
ESL learners, Second Workshop on Advances in Text Input Methods (WTIM 2012), 2012.
Masato Hagiwara, Satoshi Sekine. Latent Semantic Transliteration using Dirichlet Mixture. NEWS2012 (the 4th Named Entities Workshop), pp. 30-37, 2012.
Graham Neubig, Yuichiroh Matsubayashi, Masato Hagiwara, Koji Murakami. Safety Information
Mining — What can NLP do in a disaster —, Proc. of IJCNLP 2011.
Masato Hagiwara and Satoshi Sekine. Latent Class Transliteration based on Source LanguageOrigins. Proc. of ACL-HLT 2011, pp. 53-57, 2011.
Masato Hagiwara and Hisami Suzuki. Japanese Query Alteration Based on Lexical Semantic
Similarity. Proc. of NAACL HLT 2009, pp. 191-199, 2009.
Nobuyuki Shimizu, Masato Hagiwara, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Katsuhiko Toyama and Hiroshi
Nakagawa. Metric learning for synonym acquisition. Proc. of COLING 2008, pp. 793-800, 2008.
Masato Hagiwara. A Supervised Learning Approach to Automatic Synonym Identification basedon Distributional Features. Proc. of ACL 2008 Student Research Workshop, pp. 1-6, 2008.
Masato Hagiwara, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Katsuhiko Toyama. Context Feature Selection forDistributional Similarity. Proc. of IJCNLP 2008, pp. 553-560, 2008.
Masato Hagiwara, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Katsuhiko Toyama. Selection of Effective Contextual
Information for Automatic Synonym Acquisition. COLING/ACL 2006, pp. 353 - 360, 2006.
Masato Hagiwara, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Katsuhiko Toyama. PLSI Utilization for Automatic ThesaurusConstruction. Proc. of IJCNLP 2005, pp. 334 - 345, 2005.

PRESS●●The best time of day to learn a new language, according to Duolingo data (Feb. 2018, Quartz)
3 habits of successful language learners (Mar. 2017, TechCrunch)

LANGUAGES
Japanese (native), English (fluent), Mandarin Chinese (fluent), Korean (intermediate)