Seki, Y. Laboratory

“Automatic Evaluation of Indicators for City Services Using Citizen Sentiments in Social Media” (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), Principal Investigator: Yohei Seki, FY2019 – FY2022)

Our laboratory is conducting research on information access and natural language processing technologies, focusing on data in social media, especially comments that reflect citizens’ opinions. We aim to realize a future society in which the opinions and information we send out are delivered to the appropriate people who are looking for them. In such a society, everyone will be able to realize the value of their own communication. In cooperation with the Yokohama City, we have developed a technology to clarify how citizens’ opinions change in order to help local governments understand the demands of citizens during the COVID-19 situation. Mr. Tetsuya Ishida, who is currently enrolled in the master’s program, appeared on a YouTube program with the cooperation of Yokohama City to introduce his research, and then presented his achievements at an academic conference and received the Outstanding Research Award. In 2022, his research paper is accepted for Journal of Natural Language Processing. Also, how do you feel if you see similar recipes over and over again when searching for the recipe you want to cook? We have developed a technology to efficiently detect recipe combinations in which only some words are paraphrased from all recipe combinations, mainly by graduate students and in cooperation with Rakuten Institute of Technology. The graduate students who carried out the research were also awarded by the academic society. Our laboratory is widely recruiting students who are interested in such research topics.