Born in Mie Prefecture, Japan, Makoto Nagao graduated from Kyoto University in 1959, and received a master's degree in engineering in 1961 and a Ph.D. in engineering in 1966 from the university. In Kyoto University, he became an assistant professor in 1967, an associate professor in 1968, and a professor in 1973. He served as the 23rd president of Kyoto University. After retirement from the university, he was appointed to the director of National Diet Library in 2007 and held the position until 2012. He was the 20th director of the Information Processing Society of Japan . Each year since 2005, IPSJ Nagao Special Researcher Award has been awarded to young Japanese computer scientists who accomplished notable research. He is the first president of the Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation, and in each year from 2006, AAMT Nagao Award is awarded to individuals or groups who made contribution to machine translation.
Work
Makoto Nagao is one of the first scientists who developed practical machine translation systems. Between 1982 and 1986, he led the Mu project which aimed at translations for technical papers and became the first successful MT system between English and Japanese. In addition, example-based machine translation, an important approach for MT, is the method proposed by him in the early 1980s. In 1984 he introduced the analogy principle into the machine translation, which is adapted to the translation between two totally different languages, such as Japanese and English. He is also a pioneer of natural language processing for the Japanese language. In 1994, he created KNP, a dependency analyzer for Japanese, with Sadao Kurohashi. In the 1990s, he directed a project to make a Japanese parsed corpus, which is now called Kyoto University Text Corpus. Another NLP resource developed under his laboratory is :ja:Juman|Juman, a Japanese morphological parser and the first system which merged word segmentation and morphological analysisfor languages which do not have explicit word boundaries. In pattern recognition and image processing, he was the first engineer who applied feedback analysis mechanisms to facial recognition systems, and he introduced various artificial intelligence techniques into the image processing. He supervised the Ariadne software system, a digital library system, which made an impact upon digital library research in Japan and over the world. While the National Diet Library of Japan holds a traditional slogan "Truth makes us free", a new slogan "Through knowledge we prosper" is proposed by him as the director. He gave a keynote lecture in the Wikimedia Conference Japan 2009.
