Saku Sugawara

菅原 朔 (ja)
Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo
Advisor: Akiko Aizawa (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)

Email: saku(at)nii.ac.jp

Now I'm looking for a 2019 summer/autumn internship position!
I'm also looking for a (academic/industry) full-time research position starting from/after spring 2020.
Here is my CV.

Research Topics

• Computational linguistics / Natural language processing
• Natural language understanding / Machine reading comprehension
• Knowledge reasoning / Semantic representation

Education

• Apr 2017 -- present, Ph.D. student
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo
  • Research topics: natural language understanding, machine reading comprehension, knowledge reasoning, semantic representation
• Apr 2015 -- Mar 2017, M.Sc. in Information Science and Technology
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo
  • Master thesis: Prerequisite Skills of Natural Language Understanding for the Analysis and Development of Reading Comprehension
• Apr 2013 -- Mar 2015, B.A. in Letters (Philosophy)
  • Philosophy Course, Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo
  • Graduation thesis: Language Understanding Based on the Concept of Proper Function (On the biological/teleo- semantics by Ruth G. Millikan)
• Apr 2011 -- Mar 2013
  • Natural Sciences I, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo

Experience

• Nov 2018 -- Mar 2019, Visiting student, University College London, UK
• Jun 2018 -- Sep 2018, Research intern, Microsoft Research Montreal (Maluuba), Canada
• Apr 2018 -- present, Research fellow (DC2), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Japan
• May 2017 -- present, Research assistant, RIKEN AIP, Japan
• Apr 2016 -- Mar 2018, Part-time engineer, Preferred Networks, Japan
• May 2016 -- Apr 2017, Research assistant, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan
• Jun 2015 -- Mar 2016, Part-time researcher, Honda Research Institute, Japan

Publications

2018

• What Makes Reading Comprehension Questions Easier?
  Saku Sugawara, Kentaro Inui, Satoshi Sekine, Akiko Aizawa
  In the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2018), Nov 2018, pp.4208-4219.
  [pdf] [bib] [slide] [data]

2017

• Evaluation Metrics for Machine Reading Comprehension: Prerequisite Skills and Readability
  Saku Sugawara, Yusuke Kido, Hikaru Yokono, Akiko Aizawa
  In the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2017), Aug 2017, pp.806-817.
  [pdf] [bib] [slide] [data]
  
• Prerequisite Skills for Reading Comprehension: Multi-perspective Analysis of MCTest Datasets and Systems
  Saku Sugawara, Hikaru Yokono, Akiko Aizawa
  In the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-17), Feb 2017, pp.3089-3096.
  [pdf] [bib] [slide] [data]

2016

• Annotation and Analysis of Discourse Relations, Temporal Relations and Multi-Layered Situational Relations in Japanese Texts
  Kimi Kaneko, Saku Sugawara, Koji Mineshima, Daisuke Bekki
  In COLING 2016 Workshop on Asian Language Resources 12 (ALR12), Dec 2016, pp.10-19.
  [pdf] [bib] [web]
• An Analysis of Prerequisite Skills for Reading Comprehension
  Saku Sugawara, Akiko Aizawa
  In EMNLP 2016 Workshop on Uphill Battles in Language Processing (UBLP), Nov 2016, pp.1-5.
  [pdf] [bib] [poster] [web] [data]
• On Dialogue Breakdown: Annotation and Detection - dialogue breakdown detection challenge
  Kotaro Funakoshi, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Michimasa Inaba, Yuka Kobayashi, Saku Sugawara, Katsuya Takanashi, Hiroko Otsuka, Hanae Koiso, Mayumi Bono
  In IVA 2016 Workshop on Chatbots and Conversational Agent Technologies (WOCHAT), Sep 2016.
  [pdf] [web]

Talks

• Evaluation Metrics for the Machine Reading Comprehension Task.
  In MiCS, Tohoku University, Japan, Nov 2017.
• Evaluation Metrics for the Machine Reading Comprehension Task.
  In Techtalk, Google Tokyo, Japan, Oct 2017.
• An Overview and Analysis of Reading Comprehension Tasks.
  In Nagoya NLP seminar, Nagoya University, Japan, Jun 2017.