Kentaro Inui
Kentaro Inui researches natural language understanding and its use in education. His documented work includes short-answer scoring, grammatical error correction and tests of language inference. In 2020, he coauthored R4C with Naoya Inoue and Pontus Stenetorp. The benchmark evaluates the reasons that a reading-comprehension system gives for its answers. As of October 2026, he directs RIKEN’s Natural Language Understanding Team.
- Now at
- RIKEN and Tohoku University
- Works
- 495
- Citations
- 5,376
- h-index
- 36
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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2019
Scoring written answers
Inui coauthored work on automated short-answer scoring and finding the text that supports a score. Inui also worked on collecting counter-arguments. These projects connect language processing with the assessment of written reasoning.
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2020
Checking reasons for answers
With Naoya Inoue and Pontus Stenetorp, Inui introduced R4C. The benchmark asks a reading-comprehension system for an answer and a derivation that supports it. This addresses tests where a correct answer can come from dataset shortcuts.
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2020
Language correction and inference
His ACL papers cover grammatical error correction, named-entity recognition and the systematic use of inference rules in language. These are separate shared studies of the information that language systems learn and use.
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As of October 2026
Language research at RIKEN
Inui directs RIKEN’s Natural Language Understanding Team. The team develops tasks for assessing human language activity, including arguments and educational responses. Its work combines basic language research with practical assessment tools.
Sources and credits
Photo: www.riken.jp; Kentaro Inui profile photograph; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: riken.jp. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.