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Ikuya Yamada

Chief Scientist, Studio Ousia Inc.
Specially Appointed Professor (Visiting), Center for Language AI Research, Tohoku University
Visiting Professor, Center for Artificial Intelligence, Mathematical, and Data Science, Nagoya University
Visiting Scientist, RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

I’m passionate about developing innovative technologies that benefit society.
My current focus is on natural language processing and large language models.
Ph.D. and Kaggle Master.

日本語のページへ

What's New

July 2025
Appointed as a Specially Appointed Professor (Visiting) at Tohoku University.
September 2024
Published a new Japanese book: Introduction to Large Language Models II.
September 2024
Appointed as a Visiting Professor at Nagoya University.
May 2024
Appointed as a Senior Action Editor for the ACL Rolling Review.

Selected Work

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Research on Language Models

I conduct research on large language models and pre-trained language models. LUKE, a knowledge-enhanced language model released in 2020, achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. As of 2025, related papers have received over 1,000 citations.
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Research on Question Answering

I work on question answering (QA) systems, where AI answers questions. Our AI systems have performed exceptionally in multiple international competitions. At the NIPS 2017 Human-Computer QA Competition, our system achieved the best performance and decisively beat a team of six U.S. quiz champions. At the NeurIPS 2020 EfficientQA Competition, we ranked 2nd in the constrained track (behind Facebook) and 3rd in the open track (behind Microsoft and Facebook).
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Research on Named Entity Recognition and Linking

I specialize in named entity recognition and linking in text. Our methods achieved top performance in two international competitions: the NEEL Challenge at WWW 2015 and the W-NUT Shared Task at ACL 2015. I developed Wikipedia2Vec, an open-source tool for learning entity embeddings, which is publicly available and widely used.
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“Introduction to Large Language Models” Japanese Book Series

I planned, co-authored, and supervised a series of introductory Japanese books that explain large language models from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The first volume was published in 2023, followed by the second in 2024.

Links:

Publications

For academic papers, please refer to my Google Scholar page.

Achievements

I have achieved top results in the following international competitions:

2nd Place
NeurIPS 2020 Efficient Open-Domain Question Answering Competition（restricted 6GB track)
3rd Place
NeurIPS 2020 Efficient Open-Domain Question Answering Competition（unrestricted track）
1st Place
ISWC 2020 Semantic Web Challenge on Tabular Data to Knowledge Graph Mining
1st Place
NIPS 2017 Human-Computer Question Answering Competition
2nd Place
WSDM Cup 2017 Triple Scoring Task
1st Place
Shared Task in NAACL 2016 Workshop on Human-Computer QA
1st Place
Shared Task #1 in ACL 2015 Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2015)
1st Place
NEEL Challenge in WWW 2015 Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts

Career

I founded Newrong Inc. upon entering university and pursued business alongside my studies. Later, I co-founded Studio Ousia Inc., where I have been engaged in research on natural language processing and large language models.

2000
Graduated from Keio Shonan Fujisawa Senior High School
2000
Appointed CEO of Newrong Inc.
2003
Appointed Director at Fractalist Inc. (following the acquisition of Newrong Inc.)
2005
Graduated from the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University
2007
Appointed Representative Director of Studio Ousia Inc.
2011
Completed Master’s Program, Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University
2016
Completed Doctoral Program, Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University; earned Ph.D.
2018
Appointed Visiting Researcher at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project
2023
Appointed Chief Scientist at Studio Ousia Inc.
2024
Appointed Visiting Professor at the Center for Education and Research in Mathematical and Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Nagoya University
2025
Appointed Specially Appointed Professor (Visiting) at the Language AI Research Center, Tohoku University