Makoto Nagao

Nihongo|Makoto Nagao|長尾 真|Nagao Makoto|October 4, 1936 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. 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.

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). 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 1999: C&C Prize 2003: ACL Lifetime Achievement Award 2005: Japan Prize 2008: Person of Cultural Merit 2018: Order of Culture 2019: Okawa Prize 2020: Asian Scientist 100, Asian Scientist