Hitomi Yanaka

Hitomi Yanaka is an Associate Professor (tenured) at the University of Tokyo and Team Leader of the Explainable AI Team at RIKEN. Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence, and formal semantics, with a specialization in logical inference systems and compositional semantics. She holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Tokyo and has been recognized with prestigious awards including the Young Scientists Award from the Ministry of Education and Forbes JAPAN's Women In Tech TOP30 in 2024.

Her academic roles include leadership in the "覚醒" project and affiliations with ACL, JSAI, and ANLP. Yanaka's work bridges theoretical linguistics and computational methods, contributing to semantic analysis, bias detection in LLMs, and multimodal reasoning. She teaches courses on computational linguistics and logic at the University of Tokyo, and her research spans over 150 publications in top-tier conferences like ACL, NLP, and Cognitive Science Society.

Award highlights include the 2024 文部科学大臣表彰 (Ministry of Education Award), 2023船井研究奨励賞, and multiple best paper awards. Her lab, Yanaka Laboratory, focuses on explainable AI, ethical AI, and advancing NLP through logical frameworks. Current projects include analyzing social biases in Japanese LLMs and developing neuro-symbolic systems for multimodal tasks.