About Me

Latest News

We were interviewed by Nikkei Newspaper.

Recent Publications

Intelligent Robot Dialogue Laboratory welcomes three new students!

Koichiro Yoshino, Ph.D.

Team Leader
Knowledge Acquisition and Dialogue Research Team
Guardian Robot Project
Information R&D and Strategy Headquarters (R-IH)
RIKEN


Affiliate Professor
Intelligent Robot Dialogue Laboratory, Information Science Division
Nara Institute of Science and Technology


Educations

  • Ph.D. Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, 2014.
    Thesis: Spoken Dialogue System for Information Navigation based on Statistical Learning of Semantic and Dialogue Structure.
    Supervisor: Prof. Tatsuya Kawahara

  • M.S. Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, 2011.
    Thesis: Spoken Dialogue System based on Information Extraction using Similarity of Predicate Argument Structures.
    Supervisor: Prof. Tatsuya Kawahara

  • B.A. Environment and Information, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan, 2009.
    Thesis: Dialogue Topic Segmentation based on Boosting Algorithm for Tree Classification.
    Supervisor: Prof. Shun Ishizaki

Activities

Work Experiences
Fulltime or Research Assistant
  • Team Leader, RIKEN, 2020 -
  • Assistant Professor, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 2016 - 2020
  • Project Assistant Professor, Nara Institute of Science and Technology Bigdata Project, 2015-2016
  • Research fellow (PD), Japan Society for Promotion of Science, 2014 -- 2015
  • Research fellow (DC2), Japan Society for Promotion of Science, 2013 -- 2014
  • Research Assistant, Kyoto University ACCMS, 2011 -- 2013
Others
  • Affiliate Associate Professor, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Augmented Human Communication Laboratory, 2020 - 2022
  • Guest Researcher, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 2019 - 2020
  • Technical advisor, Hakuhodo, 2019 - 2020
  • Researcher, RIKEN AIP, 2018 - 2019
  • Researcher, PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency, 2016 - 2020
  • Technical advisor, Net Smile, Inc., 2015- 2020
Internships
  • Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MA, USA), Dec. 2012 -- Mar. 2013.
    Topic: Spoken Dialogue System. Supervisor: Dr. Shinji Watanabe and Dr. John R. Hershey
  • NICT (Kyoto, Japan), Aug. 2009 -- Sep. 2009.
    Topic: Sentence Extraction for Spoken Dialogue System. Supervisor: Dr. Teruhisa Misu
  • NTT CS Lab. (Kyoto, Japan), Sep. 2008.
    Topic: Key Sentence Extraction for QA System. Supervisor: Dr. Ryuichiro Higashinaka
Activities in Academic Societies
Editor
  • Transaction of Association for Natural Langauge Processing
  • Computer Speech & Language special issue "Results from the 7th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC7)"
  • Computer Speech & Language special issue "Results from the 6th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC6)"
  • Journal of JSAI special issue "Intelligent Dialogue System"
  • ACL Rolling Review (ARR)
Journal Reviewer
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing,
  • Computer Speech & Language
  • Transaction of JSAI
  • Transaction of IPSJ
  • Transaction of IEEJ
  • IEICE Transaction
  • Transaction of ANLP
Conference Reviewer
  • 2022: AAAI, IEEE-ICASSP, ARR, INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, COLING
  • 2021: AAAI, IEEE-ICASSP, NAACL (AC), ACL (AC), ACL-demo, SIGDIAL (SPC), INTERSPEECH, 言語処理学会大会賞
  • 2020: AAAI, DSTC8, LREC, IEEE-ICASSP, IWSDS, ACL, ACL-demo, SIGDIAL (SPC), INTERSPEECH, COLING, IEEE-SLT, 言語処理学会大会賞
  • 2019: AAAI, DSTC7, IWSDS, HRI, IEEE-ICASSP, HRI, IJCAI, ACL, ACL-best-paper, INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, CoRL, ICMI-CATSLU, IEEE-ASRU, 言語処理学会大会賞
  • 2018: IEEE-ICASSP, IWSDS, ACL, IJCAI, INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, CoRL, IEEE-SLT
  • 2017: IEEE-ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, IJCNLP, IEEE-ASRU, DSTC6
  • 2016: INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, IEEE-SLT
  • 2015: HAI, MLSLP, IEEE-ASRU
Committee
  • Senior Program Committee, Annual conference of the joint ACL/ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2021
  • Area Chair, Machine learning, The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2021
  • Area Chair, Dialogue & interactive systems, 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2021
  • General Chair, Dialogue system technology challenge 10, 2021
  • Program Committee, 27th ANLP meeting, 2021
  • Organizing Committee, 11th dialogue system symposium, 2020
  • Senior Program Committee, Annual conference of the joint ACL/ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2020
  • Program Committee, 26th ANLP meeting, 2020
  • Organizing Committee, 10th dialogue system symposium, 2019
  • Publicity chair, Annual conference of the joint ACL/ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2019
  • Best Paper Award Committee, The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019
  • Challenge Chair, Dialogue system technology challenge 7, 2018
  • Publicity chair, International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation, 2017
  • Organizing committee, Dialogue system technology challenge 6, 2017
  • Organizer, Multimodal Agent for Ageing and Multicultural Societies, Shonan meeting, 2018
  • Organizer, The 36th RSJ meeting Organized session "Deep Learning", 2018
  • Publicity chair, International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation, 2017
  • Organizing committee, JSAI SIG-SLUD 8th Dialogue System Symposium, 2017
  • Organizing committee, Dialogue state tracking challenge 5, 2016
  • Organizing committee, JSAI SIG-SLUD 7th Dialogue System Symposium, 2016
  • Organizing committee, Young Researcher Association for NLP Studies, 2012 -- 2013
Student Volunteer
  • IEEE-ICASSP 2012
Research Funds
Main Proposer
  • 2022 -- 2025, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, Scientific Research (B), "Knowledge Inference System for Robots by Bridging Text Commonsense and Real-world Observation"
  • 2022 -- 2023, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, Innovative Areas, "Dialogue Management and Response Expressions in Persuasive Dialogue toward Building Long-term Relationships"
  • 2020 -- 2021, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, Innovative Areas, "Multimodal Dialogue Robot for Persuading Users"
  • 2019 -- 2019, Adobe Research Gift, "Image Editing System with Natural Language"
  • 2016 -- 2019, Japan Science and Technology Agency, PRESTO, "Spoken Dialogue System based on Incremental Language Understanding and Knowledge Acquisition"
  • 2017 -- 2018, Microsoft Research Asia Collaborative Research, "Sentence Generation based on Integration of Various Observations"
  • 2015 -- 2016, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, Start-Up, "Research of Practical Spoken Language Processing"
  • 2013 -- 2014, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, JSPS-Fellowship, "Multi-modal dialogue system based on Information Extraction Adaptive to Users and Domains"
Member
  • 2017 -- 2020, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, (S), "Next Generation Speech Translation"
  • 2017 -- 2020, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, (A), "Simultaneous Speech Translation with Para-Linguistic Information"
  • 2016 -- 2018, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Contract research, "IoT-to-Human System for Kyoto Inbound Tourism"
  • 2015 -- 2017, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications - JAPAN, SCOPE, Local ICT, "ICT for Elderly Monitoring System"
Awards
  • SIG Research Award, IPSJ SIG-NL, June 2022.
  • SIG Research Award, JSAI, June 2021.
  • Best Paper Award, 11th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System Technology, September 2020.
  • Best Video Finalist, 11th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System Technology, September 2020
  • Outstanding Research Award, ANLP, March 2020.
  • SIG Research Award, IPSJ SIG-NL, August 2019.
  • Best Paper Award, ACL2019 1st workshop on NLP for Conversational AI, NLP for ConvAI workshop committee, August 2019.
  • Outstanding paper Award, ANLP, March 2019.
  • Best Paper Runner-Up (finalist), International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology, IWSDS organizing committee, May 2018.
  • IPSJ SIG Recommended PhD Thesis, September July 2015.
  • The 1st IPSJ-ONE presenter, March 2015.
  • SIG Research Award, JSAI, June 2014.
  • Student Incentive Award, IPSJ SIG-NL and SIG-SLP, May 2012.