Junichi Tsujii Receives the 2021 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

Prof. Tsujii is director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Center (AIRC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. He is also a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and an emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo. He obtained his D.Eng. on the topic of Question Answering Systems from Kyoto University, where he continued working as a research assistant and associate professor. He has conducted research into Natural Language Processing in several institutions worldwide, notably CNRS (GETA), France, the University of Manchester, UK, the University of Tokyo, and Microsoft Research, China.

In his early career, Prof.Tsujii worked on Machine Translation with Prof. Nagao. The MU project, led by Prof. M. Nagao, successfully delivered the first example of a second-generation MT system; its model was adopted by several commercial MT systems in Japan. Prof. Tsujii’s work on MT continued in Manchester, where he was engaged in research into new grammar formalisms for MT (Eurotra7). This steered his work towards the new research topic of NLP based on feature-based grammar formalisms.

Prof. Tsujii led a successful research team at the University of Tokyo, whose work focused on transforming grammar formalisms in computational linguistics into a practical framework for NLP. Successful research outputs included a unification-based programming system (LiLFeS), CFG approximation of HPSG, probabilistic models of feature-based grammar and super-tagging, and a staged architecture of HPSG parsing, which resulted in an efficient and practical HPSG-based parser, Enju.

During his tenure at the University of Manchester, Prof.Tsujii worked on the study of sublanguages, in which text and domain knowledge are intrinsically intertwined with each other. His interest in this topic resulted in his application of NLP methods to the task of text mining for the biomedical domain.

In the early 2000s, the teams at the University of Manchester, through the National Centre for Text Mining, and the University of Tokyo collaborated to carry out novel research into NLP-based text mining for biomedicine. They delivered a wide range of tools, resources and infrastructure for biomedicine, including the GENIA corpus, the GENIA POS tagger, the brat annotation tool, infrastructure for text mining workflows, information extraction tools applied to advanced searching of the scientific literature, pathway construction, database curation etc. These efforts have been facilitated through the long-standing annual series of ACL Biomedical NLP (BioNLP) workshops and collocated shared tasks.

Prof. Tsujii is a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) and AIST. He is ex-president of ACL, the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing Associations (AFNLP), and the International Association of Machine Translation (IAMT). He is Chair of the International Committee of Computational Linguistics (ICCL).

In 2010, Prof. Tsujii was awarded the Medal of Honour with Purple Ribbon, one of Japan's highest awards, presented to influential contributors in the fields of art, academics, or sports.