Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii's Home Page

Professor

Waseda University

About my Research

I am interested in applying complex systems theory to natural language in order to understand the fractal and chaotic nature of language. My approach includes large language models and various machine learning techniques, as well as analysis methods from statistical mechanics.

I apply these insights to the development of large-scale social systems, including those related to finance and law. Additionally, I continue to publish my philosophical reflections on semiotic systems.

Previously, I published the following two monographs, both in English and Japanese :

Short Bio

• Professor of Waseda University 2023-.
• Professor of University Tokyo 2016-2023.
• Visiting fellow of Cambridge University 2022-2023.
• Professor of Kyushu University 2012-2016.
• Associate professor of University of Tokyo 2002-2012.
• Lecturer of University of Tokyo 2000-2002.
• Ph.D. in natural language processing, M.E. in functional programming language, and B.E. in applied mathematics, University of Tokyo.
• Invited student researcher at LIMSI-CNRS France 1995-1996.

Very Short List of my Journal Papers

• Xin Du and Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii.Correlation dimension of natural language in a statistical manifold. Physical Review Research, 6(L022028), 2024.
• Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii and Akira Tanaka. Strahler number of natural language sentences in comparison with random trees. Journal of Statistical Mechanics, 2023(1234034), 2023.
• Shuntaro Takahashi and Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii. Evaluating computational language models with scaling properties of natural language. Computational Lingusitics, 45(3):1–33, 2019.
• Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii and Tatsuru Kobayashi.Taylor’s law for linguistic sequences and random walk models. Journal of Physics Communications, 2(11):115024, 2018. 089401.
• Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii. Void of sign. In Semiotica, number 218, pages 119–135. Mouton de Gruyter, August 2017.
• Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii and Shunsuke Aihara. Computational constancy measures of texts – Yule’s K and R ́enyi’s entropy. Computational Linguistics, 41(3):481–502, 2015.
• Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii and Hiroshi Terada. Word familiarity and frequency. Studia Linguistica, 65(1):96–116, 2010.