Professor Inui’s ongoing research centers on the inner workings and interpretability of language and multi-modal models, for example, how they internally represent and organize knowledge about the world and how mechanistic explanations of model behavior can be developed, seeking to enhance the explainability, transparency, and trustworthiness of NLP systems. He also investigates how interpretability links to fields like cognitive science, neuroscience, and robotics. Additionally, he is interested in applying NLP to education, including explainable writing assessment and argumentation analysis for learning support. Email
Before joining MBZUAI, Professor Inui led the Natural Language Processing Lab at Tohoku University for over a decade and directed the Natural Language Understanding Team at the RIKEN Center for the Advanced Intelligence Project, where he maintains active collaborations.
He began his career as an Assistant Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1995, later becoming an Associate Professor at the Kyushu Institute of Technology and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology before joining Tohoku University in 2010. He also worked as a visiting researcher at the University of Sussex in 2004.
Over his career, he has served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Information Processing and the Journal of Natural Language Processing, and as Chairperson of the Association for Natural Language Processing in Japan. He also took on the role of General Chair for EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 and, more recently, serves as General Chair for IJCNLP-AACL 2025 and Program Co-chair for EACL 2026.
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