Activities ▸ Overview

Policy

One important mission of a university research lab is to develop students’ skills. We design lab activities so that students can acquire general-purpose skills for problem-finding and problem-solving, let alone expertise in natural language processing research and its related areas.

Through the lab activities, students will learn how to think critically, how to plan, how to present their work, how to dive into unknown fields, how to program, and how to work as a team. Our motto is that research is the best “on-the-job (OJT) training” for developing such skills (the founder Prof. Inoue's favorite word learned from his old mentor).

Activities

Following the above policy, the lab implements five types of student-driven activities:

1. Lab Meeting (weekly): All lab members gather to discuss their research progress.
2. Unit Meeting (weekly): People who are interested in a particular research topic gather to discuss academic frontiers. We also discuss research progress in depth and brainstorm together. We have the following unit meetings:
• XAI Unit
• Argumentation + Logical Reasoning Unit
• Visual Reasoning Unit
3. Study Groups (on-demand): Knowledge is an important vehicle of healthy research projects. We learn something together—e.g., the basics of NLP, programming, and any topic we want to learn.
• Learning Basics of NLP
4. 1-on-1 Meeting (monthly, on-demand): Students and Prof. Inoue have more intense discussions about their research progress.
5. Social Gathering (on-demand): We celebrate many things—Welcome party, farewell party, birthday party, year-end party, new year party, …

On top of these activities, students actively discuss with lab members, come up with innovative ideas, program these ideas as a computational model, and evaluate these ideas quantitatively and qualitatively. After a number of trials, someday, students will obtain interesting insights. They then write and submit a paper to academic conferences to improve the idea, communicating with researchers worldwide.

To develop globally successful students, we use English, one of the most well-used languages in the world, as a common language in these activities.