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　(Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Osamu Hata; hereinafter "WAP") has been selected to receive the Tokushima Prefecture Regional Informatization Award (e-Tokushima Award) for 2022 for its contribution to the promotion of regional informatization. The institute opened in 2017 and conducts research on natural language processing, which is essential for chatbots, search engines, and machine translation. In addition to its efforts in industry-academia-government collaboration, the institute was recognized for its free provision of research results in the form of OSS (Open Source Software) *1 and their wide use. The award ceremony will be held in Tokushima City on January 25.

1. Points received for contributions to the promotion of local informatization in Tokushima Prefecture.

　The NLP Laboratory conducts research and development in the field of natural language processing, which we use every day, in collaboration with industry, academia, and government, and its achievements have been recognized at international conferences*2, contributing to the development of basic research in this field. The results have been highly evaluated at international conferences*2 and contribute to the development of basic research in the field. For example, "Sudachi," an OSS named after a local specialty of Tokushima, Sudachi, is a tool for morphological analysis*3, a fundamental technology for natural language processing, with a registered vocabulary of 2.9 million words (as of May 2022), the largest in Japan. SudachiPy, one of the Sudachi series, has been downloaded 7.6 million times, making it one of the most popular OSS for Japanese language processing*4. These OSS are used by companies and research institutes to search information from huge amounts of data, classify text, and improve the accuracy of reading text strings in images and PDFs.
　We also collaborate with universities and companies in Tokushima Prefecture through joint research with the University of Tokushima and exchanges of opinions with venture companies of the University of Tokushima. In Japan, joint research has also been conducted with the Nara Institute of Science and Technology and the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics of the National Institutes for the Humanities, and recently, the New Future Creation Strategy Headquarters of the Consumer Affairs Agency, established in Tokushima Prefecture, has published a paper*5 utilizing Sudachi.

2. Natural Language Processing Researchers from Around the World Come to Tokushima; International Members Participate

　Although Japanese is the target of research at the Works Tokushima NLP Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence, researchers from France, Vietnam, Indonesia, Russia, and other countries are currently working on development. We are also collaborating with researchers from WAP Group companies in Singapore and Shanghai, and our international members are working on R&D. In addition, there are about three researchers from Tokushima, including the director, Yoshitaka Uchida.

<Director Yoshitaka Uchida's Profile>
After participating in a robot contest at a technical college, he became interested in artificial intelligence. 2000, he transferred to the Faculty of Information Engineering at the Kyushu Institute of Technology, where he has been working on dialogue systems in the field of natural language processing. He conducted research on dialogue systems in the field of natural language processing, and in 2004, after completing his master's degree, he joined JustSystems in Tokushima, Japan. In July 2004, he joined Works Applications, Inc.

If you wish, we will be happy to coordinate interviews with Director Uchida and the researchers. Please contact us at . Works Applications Public Relations [email protected]

3. About the Works Tokushima NLP Research Institute

　A research institute established in February 2017 by the WAP Group, which develops and sells ERP and groupware for major companies, the institute specializes in NLP = natural language processing = in the field of AI and conducts research to help computers correctly process words with ambiguous expressions, overlapping meanings, and shaky notation. Many of our research results are used in our own products, such as chatbots and AI-OCR, and are also released free of charge as OSS for use by other companies and research institutes, to help them in their research in this field and in their use of AI.

[e.g.] Ambiguity or shaky notation

Word ambiguity	chopstick bridge end chopstick aji aji flavor aji
Differences in character types	Sunflower - Himawari, Sunflower - Himawari
Difference of sending kana	Acceptance - Acceptance - Acceptance

　To further accelerate research and development of OSS, the Institute is seeking Sudachi GitHub sponsors. Individuals and organizations are welcome to sponsor as many times as they wish, with a minimum sponsorship fee of $1. Rewards for sponsorships include a logo on the website, access to a sponsor chat space, workshops, and more. For more information, please visit the following sites:
https://github.com/sponsors/WorksApplications

*1. OSS (Open Source Software): Software whose source code is publicly available and can be freely modified and redistributed by anyone without charge. Software that can be modified and redistributed freely by anyone
*2. [Example]
2018 Accepted for the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), the world's largest conference on language resources
2021 Best paper Award of the Research Group on Language Understanding and Communication (NLC) of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE)
Morphological analysis: A process that forms the basis of natural language processing (NLP). It is a technology that divides "natural language" (words commonly used in everyday life) into morphemes (the smallest unit of a word that has meaning) and assigns information such as parts of speech. By dividing into morphemes, it is possible to analyze syntax, meaning, and context.Example: I read a book → I (noun) / ha (particle) / book (noun) / wo (particle) / read (verb) / mashi (auxiliary verb) / ta (auxiliary verb)
*4 . Number of downloaded packages registered in Python Package Index
Source: https://github.com/taishi-i/awesome-japanese-nlp-resources
*5. Source: International Consumer Policy Research Center, New Future Creation Strategy Headquarters, Consumer Affairs Agency Trend analysis of consumer issues using PIO-NET( https://www.caa.go.jp/policies/future/icprc/research_004/assets/future_caa_cms201_220418_02.pdf)

About Works Applications Group

Since its establishment in 1996, Works Applications Group has been providing Products / Services mainly to major Japanese companies as Japan's first packaged software company for business applications. Based on the corporate philosophy of changing the concept of "work," making work more creative, increasing corporate productivity, and expanding corporate value, Works Applications Group aims for further development as a solution provider centered on ERP, to be a partner in promoting DX for small, medium, and start-up companies in addition to major corporations. We will continue to develop further as a solution provider with ERP at its core.

*Company names, product names and service names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
*The information in this release is current as of the date of publication, and is subject to change or withdrawal without notice. Please be aware that the forecasts and other forward-looking information in this release are based on uncertainties and may differ from actual results.