was a Japanese

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

. He contributed to various fields:

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphi ...

image processing An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

and

library science Library science (often termed library studies, bibliothecography, and library economy) is an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology, education, and ...

. He was the 23rd president of

Kyoto University , mottoeng = Freedom of academic culture , established = , type = National university, Public (National) , endowment = ¥ 316 billion (2.4 1000000000 (number), billion USD) , faculty = 3,480 (Teaching Staff) , administrative_staff ...

(1997–2003) and the 14th director of

National Diet Library The is the national library of Japan and among the largest libraries in the world. It was established in 1948 for the purpose of assisting members of the in researching matters of public policy. The library is similar in purpose and scope to ...

in Japan (2007–2012).

Biography

Born in

Mie Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Kansai region of Honshu. Mie Prefecture has a population of 1,781,948 () and has a geographic area of . Mie Prefecture is bordered by Gifu Prefecture to the north, Shiga Prefecture and Kyoto Prefecture to ...

, Japan, Makoto Nagao graduated from

in 1959, and received a

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.

in engineering in 1961 and a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

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

in 2007 and held the position until 2012. He was the 20th director of the

Information Processing Society of Japan The Information Processing Society of Japan ("IPSJ") is a Japanese learned society for computing. Founded in 1960, it is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. IPSJ publishes a magazine and several professional journals mainly in Japanese, and sponsors c ...

(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 Asia-Pacific (APAC) is the part of the world near the western Pacific Ocean. The Asia-Pacific region varies in area depending on context, but it generally includes East Asia, Russian Far East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and Pacific Isla ...

(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

(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 Example-based machine translation (EBMT) is a method of machine translation often characterized by its use of a bilingual corpus with parallel texts as its main knowledge base at run-time. It is essentially a translation by analogy and can be vie ...

, 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

(NLP) for the

Japanese language is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been ma ...

. In 1994, he created KNP, a dependency analyzer for Japanese, with Sadao Kurohashi.Sadao Kurohashi and Makoto Nagao. 1994. KN Parser : Japanese Dependency/Case Structure Analyzer. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Sharable Natural Language Resources. In the 1990s, he directed a project to make a Japanese

parsed corpus In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotated, annotates syntactic or semantic sentence (linguistics), sentence structure. The construction of parsed corpora in the early 1990s revolutionized computational linguistics, which be ...

, which is now called

Kyoto University Text Corpus Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ci ...

. 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

and

, he was the first engineer who applied feedback analysis mechanisms to

facial recognition system A facial recognition system is a technology capable of matching a human face from a digital image or a video frame against a database of faces. Such a system is typically employed to authenticate users through ID verification services, and wo ...

s, and he introduced various

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

techniques into the image processing. He supervised the Ariadne software system, a

digital library A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital me ...

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 John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Second ...

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.

Honors and awards

*1993:

IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

*1997: Medal of Honour with Purple Ribbon *1997: International Association for Machine Translation's Award of Honor *1999:

C&C Prize The NEC C&C Prize ( ja, C&C賞) is an award given by the NEC Corporation "in recognition of outstanding contributions to research and development and/or pioneering work in the fields of semiconductors, computers, telecommunications and their integr ...

*2003: ACL Lifetime Achievement Award *2004:

Professor Emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

*2005:

Japan Prize is awarded to people from all parts of the world whose "original and outstanding achievements in science and technology are recognized as having advanced the frontiers of knowledge and served the cause of peace and prosperity for mankind." The P ...

*2005: Chevalier de la

Légion d'honneur The National Order of the Legion of Honour (french: Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur), formerly the Royal Order of the Legion of Honour ('), is the highest French order of merit, both military and civil. Established in 1802 by Napoleon ...

*2008:

Person of Cultural Merit is an official Japanese recognition and honor which is awarded annually to select people who have made outstanding cultural contributions. This distinction is intended to play a role as a part of a system of support measures for the promotion of ...

*2018:

Order of Culture The is a Japanese order, established on February 11, 1937. The order has one class only, and may be awarded to men and women for contributions to Japan's art, literature, science, technology, or anything related to culture in general; recipien ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nagao, Makoto 1936 births 2021 deaths Japanese computer scientists Japanese librarians Kyoto University alumni Presidents of Kyoto University Academic staff of Kyoto University Chevaliers of the Légion d'honneur 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