Hi! I am a Senior Research Scientist at Megagon Labs. Previously, I was a Visiting Scientist at the Human Dynamics Group, MIT Media Lab (2014-2016), and a Research Scientist at NTT Laboratories (2008-2014). I received my B.E., M.E, and Ph.D. (Dr. Eng.) respectively from Keio University, Japan.

My recent research focus is at the intersection of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Data Management. I also work on computational approaches for the social sciences (known as Computational Social Science.)

I’m a ramen enthusiast.

What’s New?

• 2021-01: Our paper “Constructing Explainable Opinion Graphs from Reviews” has been accepted at WWW 2021!
• 2021-01: Our paper Deep Entity Matching: Challenges and Opportunities was published in ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality (JDIQ).
• 2020-12: Happy to know that I was listed as an outstanding reviewer at EMNLP 2020!
• 2020-12: Our paper “Extractive Opinion Summarization in Quantized Transformer Spaces” is to appear in TACL! Also check out the SPACE dataset, a new large-scale evaluation benchmark for opinion summarization!
• 2020-08: Our paper “Deep Entity Matching with Pre-Trained Language Models” has been accepted at VLDB 2021 Scalable Data Science Track!
• 2020-05: Our paper “Sato: Contextual Semantic Type Detection in Tables” was accepted to PVLDB!
• 2020-04: Our short paper “OpinionDigest: A Simple Framework for Opinion Summarization” was accepted at ACL 2020!
• 2020-03: A mass collaboration paper “Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration” on the Fragile Families Challenge was published in PNAS. I’m honor to participate in the challenge!
• 2020-02: Our demo paper “ExtremeReader: An interactive explorer for customizable and explainable review summarization” was accepted at WWW 2020! Online demo is available.
• 2020-02: We presented “Emu: Enhancing Multilingual Sentence Embeddings with Semantic Specialization” at AAAI 2020! Check out our blog post.

Academic Service

• Program Commitee/Reviewer
  • Conference: ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, EACL, AAAI, IJCAI, CoNLL, *SEM, LREC
  • Journal: ACM Transactions (HEALTH, IMWUT, JDIQ), PLOS One

FAQ

• Q. Are you the famous green dinosaur?
  A. No. I’m not working with the famous Italian plumber, but both of us are originally from Japan. Yoshi means “good” in Japanese, and my full first name Yoshihiko means “a good boy”, which well describes myself. :)

• Q. What is your favorite ramen place?
  A. Please contact me for my private list of the best ramen places. :)