Yaraku, Inc. (Shibuya, Tokyo, CEO: Suguru Sakanishi) , a provider of online translation platform “YarakuZen”, is pleased to announce that Toshiaki Nakazawa has been appointed as an advisor to the Natural Language Processing team.
Background of Toshiaki Nakazawa’s Appointment
Yaraku develops various AI functions for YarakuZen using Natural Language Processing technology, such as our “personalized translation” that learns and improves for each user, and the “quality assistant” that helps to improve the quality of machine translation results and facilitate post-editing.
The addition of Toshiaki Nakazawa to the team, which is responsible for the development of those functions and products, will further strengthen our research and development system.
Profile of Toshiaki Nakazawa
Completed his Master’s degree at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo. D. degree at Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. D. in Informatics. Has worked as a researcher and assistant professor at Kyoto University, a researcher at Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), and currently a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo. Specializes in Natural Language Processing, particularly machine translation, and has presented his results at numerous international conferences. Was involved in a project for the practical application of machine translation, and achieved the practical application of machine translation systems for Japanese-English, Japanese-Chinese, and other languages.
His social contributions include serving on the editorial board of the journal Natural Language Processing for two years from 2013. In 2014, he founded the Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT), an international machine translation evaluation workshop focusing on Asian languages, where he continues to serve as an organizer. In 2017, he served as chair of the Young Researcher Association for NLP Studies. Also in 2017, he served on the Program Committee of the Association for Language Processing for two years Has given tutorials and invited talks at national and international conferences on Natural Language Processing and machine translation. Since 2018, he has been teaching artificial intelligence techniques to working professionals. Co-authored the book “Machine Translation” by Corona Publishing in 2014, and offered a commentary on the book “Machine Translation: History, Technology, Industry” published by Morikita Publishing in 2020.
Comments from Toshiaki Nakazawa
Machine translation technology has made remarkable progress, and now anyone can use high-performance machine translation easily and for free. However, machine translation does not guarantee its quality, and review and revision by humans are required whenever translations in multiple languages are published. Yaraku incorporates the latest research findings to provide a solution that performs this task efficiently and accurately.
I will use my accumulated knowledge of Natural Language Processing, especially machine translation, to make Yaraku’s solutions more robust and contribute to making Yaraku even more successful.
What is YarakuZen?
YarakuZen is a translation platform that integrates machine translation, editing / sharing, and ordering for translation companies. It features a simple interface that anyone can use intuitively, high-quality machine translation that is personalized and adjusted to your preferences with machine learning, and robust security. Masaru Yamada, a professor at Rikkyo University and a leading researcher in machine translation, participates in the development as chief evangelist.
About Us
Company name: Yaraku, Inc.
URL: https://www.yaraku.com
5-27-5 Sendagaya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo Link Square Shinjuku 16th floor
Establised in: August 2009
CEO: Suguru Sakanishi
Business details: Planning, development and operation of multilingual communication tools
About Yaraku, Inc.
Yaraku is a company with the mission of “enjoy global communication”, and we support people globally by respecting diverse cultures, ways of thinking, and languages, and by making their communication fun.
Aiming to build a translation infrastructure necessary for global communication, we offer YarakuZen, a simple translation platform that combines everything necessary for translation – from machine translation to editing and sharing, and ordering to translation companies. We are also conducting AI-related research utilizing the know-how and resources cultivated through the development of YarakuZen and machine translation engines.
AI translation + human editing enables translation that evolves the more it is used, for both AI and people. We will be the bridge of people and contribute to increasing the bilingual population.