Last Updated: October 16, 2024

AYANA NIWA
Ph.D. in Engineering / NLP Researcher\faAt : ayana.niwa.28@gmail.com\faMapMarker : Tokyo, Japan\faGlobe : ayaniwa.github.io/\faTwitter : @ayaniwa1213\faSpeakerDeck : ayaniwa

RESEARCH AND WORK EXPERIENCE
Researcher
MBZUAIx Oct. 2024 –( Abu Dhabi, UAEx Apr. 2023 – Sep. 2024

( Tokyo, Japanx June 2023 – Sep. 2024

( Tokyo, Japan

Research Scientist
Megagon Labs, Recruit Co., Ltd.
• Job Description: dialogue systems, task ambiguity

Researcher
Tokyo Institute of Technology• Research Theme: Prompt optimization, non-autoregressive generation

JSPS Research Fellow (DC2)Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciencex Apr. 2021 – Mar. 2023

( Tokyo, Japan• Research Theme: Structuring templates and acquiring lexical knowledge for text generation

Internship and Outsourced Business
Megagon Labs, Recruit Co., Ltd

x June 2019 – Mar. 2023

( Tokyo, Japanx Sep. 2018 – Mar. 2023

( Tokyo, Japan• Research Theme: Sentiment analysis

Collaborative Research
CyberAgent, Inc.
• Slogan generation using rhetorical devices

EDUCATION
Tokyo Institute of Technology
Ph.D. Student in Computer Sciencex Apr. 2020 – Mar. 2023

( Tokyo, JapanTokyo Institute of Technology
M.S. in Computer Sciencex Apr. 2018 – Mar. 2020

( Tokyo, JapanSophia University
B.S. in Science Informationx Apr. 2014 – Mar. 2018

( Tokyo, Japan

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS\faFile *[regular]: Journal• Ayana N., Sho, T., & Naoaki, O. (2023). Nearest Neighbor Non-autoregressive Text Generation. Journal of Information

Processing, 31, 344–352. doi:10.2197/ipsjjip.31.344• Ayana N., Naoaki, O., Kohei, W., Keisuke, N., & Masataka, M. (2021). Construction of a Corpus of Rhetorical Devices

in Slogans and Structural Analysis of Antitheses. ACM Trans. Asian Low-Resour. Lang. Inf. Process., 20(6). doi:10.1145/3465218\faFile *[regular]: International Conferences• Ayana N., & Hayate, I. (2024b). AmbigNLG: Addressing Task Ambiguity in Instruction for NLG. Proceedings of the 2024

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Long Papers), Miami, Florida: Association for Computational Linguistics, (to appear).

• Kaneko, M., Takase, S., Ayana N., & Okazaki, N. (2022). Interpretability for Language Learners Using Example-Based

Grammatical Error Correction. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics(Volume 1: Long Papers), 7176–7187. doi:10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.496• Ayana N., Keisuke, N., & Naoaki, O. (2021b). Predicting Antonyms in Context using BERT. Proceedings of the 14th In-ternational Conference on Natural Language Generation, 48–54. doi:10.18653/v1/2021.inlg-1.6\faFile *[regular]: Article• Ayana N., Sho, Y., Junya, T., & Itsumi, S. (2024). NLP Colloquium. (to appear).

\faUsers : Domestic Conferences and Symposiums• Ayana N., & Hayate, I. (2024a). Addressing Ambiguity in Instruction for NLG. In the 30th Annual Meeting of the Associ-ation of Natural Language Processing (NLP2024), Hyogo, Japan.

• Ayana N., & Naoaki, O. (2023). Investigating the Eﬀectiveness of Neighbor Distributions in the Pretrained Model T5.

In the 29th Annual Meeting of the Association of Natural Language Processing (NLP2023), Okinawa, Japan. Retrieved
from https://www.anlp.jp/proceedings/annual_meeting/2023/pdf_dir/P12-6.pdf• Daisuke, T., Kohei, W., Ayana N., & Naoaki, O. (2023). Testing for Dependence on the Direction of Sentence Genera-tion in Large Language Models. In the 29th Annual Meeting of the Association of Natural Language Processing (NLP2023),
Okinawa, Japan. Retrieved from https://www.anlp.jp/proceedings/annual_meeting/2023/pdf_dir/H9-1.pdf• Ayana N., Sho, T., & Naoaki, O. (2022). Non-autoregressive Generation using the Nearest Neighbor. In the 28th An-

nual Meeting of the Association of Natural Language Processing (NLP2022), Online. Retrieved from https://www.anlp.jp/proceedings/annual_meeting/2022/pdf_dir/C6-3.pdf• Ryogo, I., Ayana N., Mizuki, S., & Naoaki, O. (2022). Robust Dependency Parsing for the Omission of a Post-positionalParticle using Pseudo Training Data. In the 28th Annual Meeting of the Association of Natural Language Processing (NLP2022),Online. Retrieved from https://www.anlp.jp/proceedings/annual_meeting/2022/pdf_dir/B7-1.pdf• Ayana N., & Hiroshi, M. (2021). A Study for Sentiment Analysis Accepting the Diverse of Emotion Sensitivities. In Pro-ceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artiﬁcial Intelligence (JSAI2021). doi:10.11517/pjsai.
JSAI2021.0_2Yin506• Ayana N., Keisuke, N., & Naoaki, O. (2021a). Antonym Prediction in Context with BERT. In the 27th Annual Meeting of

the Association of Natural Language Processing (NLP2021), Online. Retrieved from https://www.anlp.jp/proceedings/
annual_meeting/2021/pdf_dir/C9-1.pdf• Natsumi, N., Tatsuya, H., Ayana N., Keisuke, N., & Naoaki, O. (2021). Advertisement Slogan Generation Considering

Company Information. In the 27th Annual Meeting of the Association of Natural Language Processing (NLP2021), Online.
Retrieved from https://www.anlp.jp/proceedings/annual_meeting/2021/pdf_dir/B3-3.pdf• Ayana N., Keisuke, N., & Naoaki, O. (2020). Slogan Generation with Antitheses Structure with Masked Language Mod-els. In the 15th Young Researcher Association for NLP Studies Symposium 2020 (YANS2020), Online.

• Ayana N., Kohei, W., Keisuke, N., Masataka, M., & Naoaki, O. (2020a). Analysis of Antitheses Structure in Advertise-ment Slogan. In the 26th Annual Meeting of the Association of Natural Language Processing (NLP2020), Ibaraki, Japan.
Retrieved from https://www.anlp.jp/proceedings/annual_meeting/2020/pdf_dir/D3-4.pdf• Ayana N., Kohei, W., Keisuke, N., Masataka, M., & Naoaki, O. (2020b). Antithesis structure analysis in slogan using
span candidate reﬁnement with word correspondence. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the JapaneseSociety for Artiﬁcial Intelligence (JSAI2020). doi:10.11517/pjsai.JSAI2020.0_1E5GS901• Natsumi, N., Tatsuya, H., Ayana N., Naoaki, O., Kohei, W., Kazuya, K., & Keisuke, N. (2020). Advertisement Slogan

Generation Considering company information. In the 15th Young Researcher Association for NLP Studies Symposium
2020 (YANS2020), Online.

• Ayana N., Naoaki, O., Keisuke, N., Chihiro, K., & Masataka, M. (2019a). A Study toward Automatic Advertisement Slo-gan Generation Considering Rhetorical Devices. In the 14th Young Researcher Association for NLP Studies Symposium
2019 (YANS2019), Sapporo, Japan.

• Ayana N., Naoaki, O., Keisuke, N., Chihiro, K., & Masataka, M. (2019b). Analysis for Advertisement Slogan Generation.

In the 25th Annual Meeting of the Association of Natural Language Processing (NLP2019), Nagoya, Japan. Retrieved fromhttps://www.anlp.jp/proceedings/annual_meeting/2019/pdf_dir/P3-12.pdf

AWARDSNLP 2024 Young Researcher’s Encouragement Award (18/427)
x Mar. 2024

~ Website

NLP 2022 Committee Special Award (16/365)
x Mar. 2022

~ Website2021 Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship: Nomination Award
x Nov. 2021

~ Website

COMMITTEEJSAI Executive Committeex 2024~ Website

INLG2024 Local Organizer
x 2024~ Website

NLP2024 Executive Committeex 2024~ Website

NLP Colloquium
x June 2021 –~ Website

NLP Study Group for Doctoral Students Organizerx Dec. 2020 – Mar. 2023

~ Website

Young Researcher Association for NLP Studies (YANS) Commiteex Mar. 2020 – Mar. 2022

~ Website

INVITED TALKSA Quick Overview to Unlock the Potential of LLMs through Prompt Engineering.
x Aug. 2024

( Advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) by Tokyo AI

The Frontiers of Mathematics, Information, and AI
x Nov. 2022

( Online Seminar for middle and high-school female students by AIP RIKEN

Career Path as a Female Researcher
x Nov. 2021

( NeurIPS Meetup Japan 2021, Women in Machine Learning (WiML)

Derivation and Use of Templates in Natural Language Generationx Nov. 2021

( Special Interest Group on Fundamental Problems in Artiﬁcial Intelligence (SIG-FPAI)

Trends in Natural Language Processing at NeurIPS 2019x Mar. 2020

( The 78th AI Seminar: AI Trends and Top Conferences debrieﬁng session (NeurIPS2019) by JSAIA Smart Computer that Understands Language
x Nom. 2019

( Jissen Gakuen Senior High School, Tokyo

Natural Language Processing
x June 2019

( Denenchofu High School, TokyoSCHOLARSHIP, FELLOWSHIP, AND GRANTS-IN-AID
Research Fellowship for Young Scientists by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
4,800,000 JPY / APPROX 45,000 USD
x Apr. 2021 — Mar. 2023

• The most prestigious fellowship for Ph.D. students in Japan [Acceptance Rate < 20%]

Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows: Research Grant (Grant Number: 21J13602  )1,500,000 JPY / APPROX 13,500 USD
x Apr. 2021 — Mar. 2023

NeurIPS 2019 Participation Support by the Japanese Society for Artiﬁcial Intelligence (JSAI) Full support of travel expense and registration feesx Dec. 2019

Tsubame Scholarship for Doctoral Students by Tokyo Institute of Technology 
480,000 JPY / APPROX 4,300 USD
x Apr. 2020 — Mar. 2021