Hideaki Joko

Hideaki Joko

NLP and IR researcher

Hideaki Joko - Research Engineer

Machine Learning Research Engineer (IR, NLP, LLM)

📙 Biography

Hideaki Joko is a researcher and engineer specializing in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), passionate about translating academic research into real-world impact, with a strong background in both academia and industry with 10 years of experience combined.

He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Waterloo, completing his PhD at Radboud University, Netherlands. He received his MSc from University of Tokyo for his research on NLP. He also holds solid industry experience; at Mitsubishi Electric (2016–20), he applied IR and NLP algorithms to improve factory and support operations.

He has published 10+ papers including top venues such as SIGIR and CIKM, and received 7 awards and 3 patents on IR/NLP research and development. He has delivered 10+ talks at internationally renowned institutes.

💪 Skills

  • Programming Languages: Python, C#, Java, etc.
  • Software Libraries: HuggingFace, PyTorch, Elasticsearch, etc.
  • Operating Systems: Linux, Mac OS, Windows
  • Languages: English and Japanese

💼 Work Experience

🇨🇦 University of Waterloo, Canada - Visiting Scholar
May 2025 - PRESENT (Hybrid)

  • Visiting scholar at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, working with Charles Clarke on the evaluation of large language models (LLMs).

🇳🇱 Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands - Doctoral Researcher
September 2020 - PRESENT

  • Responsible for researching and developing NLP and IR as an employed doctoral researcher at the university.
  • Researched the effectiveness of using entity information on conversational search, and published the results at TREC Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT) 2021.
  • Researched and developed conversational entity linking dataset and method, and published them at SIGIR 2021 and CIKM 2022, respectively.
  • Led the collaboration project with the University of Glasgow/Edinburgh about LLM-augmented conversational search, resulting in a full paper at SIGIR 2024.

🇬🇧 Signal AI, London, UK - Visiting Researcher
June 2022 - October 2022

  • Responsible for industrial research in NLP at one of the UK’s fastest-growing startups.
  • Researched and developed an efficient and effective target-based sentiment analysis method using Transformers.

🇯🇵 Mitsubishi Electric, Kanagawa, Japan - Research Engineer
April 2016 - August 2020

  • Developed algorithms for search, question answering, and intention understanding, resulting in multiple academic publications, patents, and a research award.
  • Developed text-based error diagnosis algorithm and software, reducing costs by ~30%.
  • Led a collaborative R&D project, developed C# information retrieval software to streamline design process, earning the R&D Center President’s Award.

‍🎓 Education

🇳🇱 Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands - PhD, Data Science
September 2020 - August 2024

  • Fully-funded PhD program, focusing on conversational search and dialogue system.

🇯🇵 University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan - MSc, Natural Language Processing
March 2016

  • Earned a research master’s from the Computing Systems Group, Multidisciplinary Science Department, through research in NLP.
  • Achieved a GPA of 3.7/4.0, demonstrating a commitment to academic excellence.
  • Thesis on synonym detection using the skip-gram model, later published in the Journal of Natural Language Processing.

🇯🇵 Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan - BEng. Applied Mathematics
March 2014

  • Graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in math from a Japanese leading institution, excelling in key subjects such as Mathematical Statistics, Differential Equations, and Applied Mathematics.
  • Thesis on accent detection using Optimality Theory earned a top grade, further inspiring him to pursue a career in R&D.

🏆 Awards

Received seven awards and grants including:

  • CIKM National Science Foundation Travel Grant covering the cost of attending CIKM up to $1000, 2022.
  • SIGIR Student Travel Grant covering the SIGIR 2021 conference registration fee, 2021.
  • Incentive Research Award from the JSAI Workshop on Interactive Information Access and Visual Mining for his research on intention understanding utilizing multi-task transfer learning, 2019.
  • Mitsubishi Electric R&D Center President Award for making a mechanical device design process efficient by developing an IR algorithm and software, 2019.

🙋 Volunteering

  • ACM SIGIR Conference Session Chair (Industry Track), 2025.
  • ACM SIGIR Conference Program Committee, 2025.
  • ACM The Web Conference Program Committee, 2024.
  • ACM CIKM Reviewer, 2024.
  • ACM SIGIR Reviewer, 2024.
  • ACM Conversational User Interface (CUI) Conference Volunteer, 2023.
  • ACM SIGIR Conference Volunteer, 2022.

📄 Publications

International Conferences

  • ACM WSDM 2025: CRS Arena: Crowdsourced Benchmarking of Conversational Recommender Systems. (co-author)
  • ACM SIGIR 2024: Doing Personal LAPS: LLM-Augmented Dialogue Construction for Personalized Multi-Session Conversational Search. (first author)
  • ACM CIKM 2022: Personal Entity, Concept, and Named Entity Linking in Conversations. (first author)
  • NIST TREC 2021: Radboud University at TREC CAsT 2021. (first author)
  • ACM SIGIR 2021: Conversational Entity Linking: Problem Definition and Datasets. (first author)
  • IEEE SMC 2019: Learning Word Embeddings Using Spatial Information. (first author)
  • IEEE/IPSJ ICMU 2018: Intention Understanding in Small Training Data Sets by Using Transfer Learning. (first author)

Refereed Journal Papers (In Japanese)

  • Accelerating Contextualized Representation based Document Retrieval Using Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search, IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, 2020. (first author)
  • Automatic Synonym Acquisition Using a Context-Restricted Skip-gram Model, Journal of Natural Language Processing, 2017. (first author)

Domestic Conferences (In Japanese)

  • Learning Word Embeddings Using Spatial Information, JSAI Workshop on Interactive Information Access and Visual Mining, 2019. (first author)
  • Intention Understanding with Small Training Data Sets by Utilizing Multi-Task Transfer Learning, JSAI Workshop on Interactive Information Access and Visual Mining, 2018. Incentive Research Award (top 10%). (first author)
  • Intention Understanding in Small Training Data Sets by Using Transfer Learning, IEICE General Conference, 2018. (first author)
  • Automatic Synonym Acquisition Using a Context-Restricted Skip-gram Model, The Association for Natural Language Processing, 2016. (first author)
  • Evaluation of Word Vectors by Synonym Identification, JSAI Workshop on Interactive Information Access and Visual Mining, 2015. (first author)

Talks/Presentations

  • SIGIR Workshop on LLM4Eval - Automatic Evaluation of Conversational Systems, 2025.
  • University of Toronto, Prof. Bagheri’s Lab - Automatic Evaluation of Conversational Systems, 2025.
  • University of British Columbia, NLP Lab - Automatic Evaluation of Conversational Systems, 2025.
  • SIGIR Tokyo - LLM-Augmented Dialogue Construction, 2024. (Invited)
  • DIR (Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop) - Conversational Entity Linking: Problem Definition and Datasets, 2023.
  • Georgia Tech ACM Student Chapter, Distinguished Speaker Series - Entity Linking for Personalization, 2023. (Invited)
  • CIKM Workshop on Mixed-Initiative Conversational Systems (MICROS) - Entity Linking for Personalization, 2022. (Invited)
  • SIGIR Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) - Entity Linking in Conversations, 2022.
  • DIR (Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop) - Entity Linking in Conversations, 2022.

💡 Patents

  • INFORMATION PROCESSING APPARATUS, NON-TRANSITORY COMPUTER-READABLE STORAGE MEDIUM, AND INFORMATION PROCESSING METHOD, H. Joko, JP7058807B2/US20220179890A1
  • LANGUAGE PROCESSING DEVICE, LANGUAGE PROCESSING SYSTEM AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING METHOD, H. Joko, JP6647475B2/US20210192139.
  • INFORMATION PROCESSING DEVICE, INFORMATION PROCESSING METHOD, AND STORAGE MEDIUM STORING INFORMATION PROCESSING PROGRAM, H. Joko, et. al., JP6833134B2/US20210224475.

🧑‍🏫 Teaching

  • Information Retrieval MSc Thesis Project at Radboud University, 2022 - Daily Supervisor
  • Information Retrieval Course at Radboud University, 2021 - Teaching Assistant

📚 Professional Development

Other than research, his interest is in solving business challenges using his expertise in NLP and IR. He has 200+ hours of data analysis, marketing, and project management education from several institutes including Wharton Online and Mitsubishi Electric.

📊 Data Analysis Course Certificates

  • A Crash Course in Causality: Inferring Causal Effects from Observational Data by University of Pennsylvania on Coursera
  • Bayesian Statistics: From Concept to Data Analysis by University of California on Coursera

👔 Marketing Course Certificates

  • Entrepreneurship 1: Developing the Opportunity by Wharton Online
  • Financial Markets by Yale University on Coursera
  • Introduction to Marketing by Wharton Online

💯 Test Score

Japanese Higher Civil Service Examination - Engineering Category

  • Successfully passed the highly selective Japanese governmental examination and interview for high-level administrative positions, with a pass rate of about 6% in total, demonstrating advanced knowledge of mathematics and engineering. Although honored by the opportunity, he ultimately chose to pursue his career as an industry researcher.