Makoto Nagao. was a Japanese computer scientist. He contributed to various fields: machine translation, natural language processing, pattern recognition, image processing and library science. He was the 23rd president of Kyoto University (1997–2003) and the 14th director of National Diet Library in Japan (2007–2012).

Early life and career
Born and raised in Mie Prefecture, Japan, Makoto Nagao graduated from Kyoto University in 1959, and received a master's degree in engineering in 1961 and a Ph.D. in engineering in 1966 from the university.
In Kyoto University, he became an assistant professor in 1967, an associate professor in 1968, and a professor in 1973. He served as the 23rd president of Kyoto University (1997–2003).
After retirement from the university, he was appointed to the director of National Diet Library in 2007 and held the position until 2012.

He was the 20th director of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) (1999–2000). Each year since 2005, IPSJ Nagao Special Researcher Award has been awarded to young Japanese computer scientists who accomplished notable research.

He was the first president of the Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation (AAMT), and in each year from 2006, AAMT Nagao Award is awarded to individuals or groups who made contribution to machine translation.

Work

Nagao was one of the first scientists who developed practical machine translation (MT) systems. Between 1982 and 1986, he led the Mu project which aimed at translations for technical papers and became the first successful MT system between English and Japanese. In addition, example-based machine translation, an important approach for MT, is the method proposed by him in the early 1980s. In 1984 he introduced the analogy principle into the machine translation, which is adapted to the translation between two totally different languages, such as Japanese and English.

He was also a pioneer of natural language processing (NLP) for the Japanese language. In 1994, he created KNP, a dependency analyzer for Japanese, with Sadao Kurohashi.
In the 1990s, he directed a project to make a Japanese parsed corpus, which is now called Kyoto University Text Corpus.
Another NLP resource developed under his laboratory is Juman, a Japanese morphological parser and the first system which merged word segmentation and morphological analysis for languages which do not have explicit word boundaries (such as Japanese or Chinese).

In pattern recognition and image processing, he was the first engineer who applied feedback analysis mechanisms to facial recognition systems, and he introduced various artificial intelligence techniques into the image processing.

He supervised the Ariadne software system, a digital library system, which made an impact upon digital library research in Japan and over the world. While the National Diet Library of Japan holds a traditional slogan "Truth makes us free" (John 8:32), a new slogan "Through knowledge we prosper" was proposed by him as the director. He gave a keynote lecture in the Wikimedia Conference Japan 2009.

Death
Nagao died from a stroke on 23 May 2021 at the age of 84.

Honors and awards
1993: IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award
1997: Medal of Honour with Purple Ribbon
1997: International Association for Machine Translation's Award of Honor
1999: C&C Prize
2003: ACL Lifetime Achievement Award
2004: Professor Emeritus of Kyoto University
2005: Japan Prize
2005: Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur
2008: Person of Cultural Merit
2018: Order of Culture

References

1936 births
2021 deaths
Japanese computer scientists
Japanese librarians
Kyoto University alumni
Presidents of Kyoto University
Academic staff of Kyoto University
Knights of the Legion of Honour
Recipients of the Medal of Honor (Japan)
People from Mie Prefecture
Recipients of the Order of Culture
Natural language processing researchers
Computational linguistics researchers
Presidents of The Japan Association of National Universities