Kikuo Maekawa

Timeline

1. 1956–1988

   Lecturer at Tottori University

   Born in Kyoto in 1956, he earns a BA in French studies in 1980 and an MA in linguistics in 1982 at Sophia University. He lectures in Japanese linguistics at Tottori University from 1984 to 1988, studying the Tottori and Izumo dialects and interviewing more than 800 subjects with his students.

2. 1989–1994

   Researcher at the national institute

   In 1989, he moves to the phonetics laboratory of the National Language Research Institute, where his early experiments study the intonation of Tokyo Japanese and of accentless dialects such as Kumamoto Japanese. In 1993, he spends 10 months as a visiting scholar in Mary Beckman's phonetics laboratory at Ohio State University.

3. 1999–2006

   The Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese

   In 1999, he leads the institute's group in a joint project with the Communications Research Laboratory and Tokyo Institute of Technology, supervised by Sadaoki Furui, to build the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese for automatic speech recognition research. The five-year project runs from 1999 to 2003; speech recognition systems trained on its data at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Kyoto University improve dramatically, and the corpus is published in April 2004. In 2006, he writes the overview and search chapters of NINJAL Report No. 124, the corpus manual.

4. 2006–2011

   A balanced corpus of written Japanese

   From 2006 to 2010, he is principal investigator of a priority-area KAKENHI grant that compiles the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ). His 2010 LREC paper with eight coauthors describes the 100-million-word corpus, drawn from books, magazines, newspapers, white papers, Diet minutes and blogs. The Chunagon search tool goes online in autumn 2010, and a DVD edition of the complete data follows in 2011.

5. 2009–2019

   Corpus center director at NINJAL

   In 2009, he becomes professor and director of the Department of Corpus Studies at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, and he directs its Center for Corpus Development until 2019. He earns a PhD in computer science from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2011 and serves as deputy director-general from 2013 to 2016. With Yukio Tono and Makoto Yamazaki, he publishes A Frequency Dictionary of Japanese with Routledge in 2013.

6. 2017–2025

   A real-time MRI speech database

   In 2017, he starts the Real-Time MRI Articulatory Movement Database (rtMRIDB), which uses real-time MRI movies to show the changing shape of the vocal tract during speech. He describes the database, developed with his colleagues, and its use for studying diversity in Japanese phonetics in a 2025 invited paper in Acoustical Science and Technology.

7. 2023

   An ISCA Fellowship

   In 2023, the International Speech Communication Association names him a Fellow for contributions to the development of language resources for the study of Japanese as a spoken language.

8. Since 2023

   Director-General of NINJAL

   In April 2023, he succeeds Yukinori Takubo as the 10th Director-General of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. He remains in the post in 2026.