The Winners of the Okawa Prize
Citation
For pioneering contributions to research in computational linguistics andnatural language processing including machine translation and text mining

Dr. Junichi Tsujii
Positions and Organizations :Director, Artiﬁcial Intelligence Research Center,
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
Professor Emeritus, The University of Tokyo
Doctorate : Ph. D. (Kyoto Univ., 1978)
Date of Birth : February 7, 1949
Brief Biography :1971 Graduated from Kyoto Univ., Faculty of Engineering,
Undergraduate School of Electrical and ElectronicEngineering
1973 Completed postgraduate master s program, Kyoto Univ.
1973 Research Associate, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto Univ.
1978 Obtained Ph.D., Kyoto Univ.
1979 Associate Professor, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto Univ.
1988 Professor, Centre for Computational Linguistics, Univ. ofManchester
1995 Professor, Univ. of Tokyo
2005 Professor, Univ. of Manchester (concurrent post)2011 Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Asia
2015 Director, Artiﬁcial Intelligence Research Center, National
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology,
Japan
Main Awards and Honors:
1988 Japan IBM Science Award
2000 Hong Kong SEYMF Visiting Professorship Award
2004 Daiwa Adrian Prize2005 IBM Faculty Award (Eclipse Innovation Award)
2008 Japanese Society for Artiﬁcial Intelligence (JSAI)
Achievement Award
2010 Medal with Purple Ribbon
2013 I n f o r m a t i o n P r o c e s s i n g S o c i e t y o f J a p a n ( I P S J )Contribution Award
2014 Funai Achievement Award
Chair of the International Committee for Computational Linguistics(ICCL), Fellow of the IPSJ, Fellow of the ACL (Association ofComputational Linguistics)
Main Achievements :Dr. Junichi Tsujii is achieving major results in research on
computational linguistics and natural language processing, particularlyin the area of sentence structure parsing, which serves as theunderlying technology of such research, and its applications in theﬁelds of machine translation and text mining. In recent years he has
also endeavored to utilize his research outcomes to create newscientiﬁc research methodologies through the development of artiﬁcial
intelligence systems for the promotion of Big Science, which extracts
and utilizes information from scientiﬁc literature.
Three of his representative achievements are cited below:

1) Research and development of machine translation
Dr. Tsujii played core roles in two machine translation projects ‒ theGovernment of Japan s Mu Project at Kyoto University in the 1980s,
and the European Community s Eurotra project at the University ofManchester in the 1990s. In the former, he undertook the constructionof a practical Japanese/English, English/Japanese translation system
for addressing article abstracts, and in the latter he achieved
pioneering results that included deﬁning the framework (Eurotra-7) for
declarative grammatical descriptions incorporating the outcomes ofcomputational linguistics. In addition, he has also been a driving force

in the ﬁeld as a worldwide leader, presenting keynote addresses on theresults of these projects at two international conferences ‒ Coling 86(Bonn) and ACL 91 (Auckland).

2) Sentence structure parsing using uniﬁcation grammar
Deep sentence parsing using grammar based on HPSG, CCG and otherfeature structures, and their uniﬁcation, had long been considered
impractical in terms of processing speed and tolerance. In response tothis, a research group at the University of Tokyo led by Dr. Tsujii
developed an abstract machine for uniﬁcation, a probability model offeature structures, a beam-search technique, CFG ﬁltering,supertagging and other methods, and demonstrated that deep sentence
parsing displays superior performance to shallow sentence parsing not
only in terms of accuracy but also in terms of processing speed. The
group also proposed an empirical method for corpus-based grammar
development and established methodologies for handling a wide rangeof linguistic phenomena.
3) Text mining for biomedicine
In contrast to conventional text mining, which perceives text asgatherings of words, Dr. Tsujii proposed a form of text mining thatperceives the structure of sentences explicitly, and he veriﬁed theeﬀectiveness of this new form by applying it to information extraction
and text mining from a large collection of biomedical dissertations. In
the process, he revealed a close relationship between the extraction of
information from text and the deﬁnition of the ontology of the ﬁeldconcerned. He then deﬁned the ontology of the ﬁeld of biomedicine andcarried out text annotation based on that deﬁnition. The outcome ofthis, the GENIA Corpus, has been widely adopted internationally as thegold standard of biomedical text mining. As an extension of thisresearch, Dr. Tsujii has since created a system that connects theinformation in the text to a more global knowledge structure(biomedical pathway), and is proposing new methodologies for sciencebased on text parsing.
As a result of these accomplishments, Dr. Tsujii has received a large
number of awards, among them the Japan IBM Science Award, Daiwa
Adrian Prize, Japanese Society for Artiﬁcial Intelligence (JSAI)
Achievement Award, Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)
Contribution Award, and the Medal with Purple Ribbon. Furthermore, asa world leader in the ﬁelds of machine translation and language processing,in 1992 he was made a permanent member of the International Committee
for Computational Linguistics (ICCL), and was elected as its Chair in 2014.
Additionally, he has served as President for the International Association
for Machine Translation (IAMT) and the Association for Computational
Linguistics (ACL), and established the Asian Federation of Natural
Language Processing (AFNLP), where he also served as President, as anorganization that brings together researchers in Asia.
On the personnel training front as well, Dr. Tsujii has produced a large
number of outstanding personnel through his teaching posts at Kyoto
University, the University of Tokyo and the University of Manchester.
He has also nurtured young researchers around the world as Head of
the University of Manchester Centre for Computational Linguistics(CCL) (1990-95), Head of the University of Manchester National Centrefor Text Mining (2005-08), Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research
Asia (Beijing) (2011-15), and Director of the National Institute ofAdvanced Industrial Science and Technology s Artiﬁcial Intelligence
Research Center.
As can be seen, along with conducting pioneering research in the ﬁeldsof machine translation, language processing and text mining, Dr.
Junichi Tsujii has contributed to training a succession of personnel, aswell as the implementation of national projects in those ﬁelds. His
contributions to science, industry and society are considerable, and heis presented with this Okawa Prize in celebration of those achievements.

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