The major research area of our laboratory is natural language processing / computational linguistics, such as morphological analysis, dependency analysis, and machine translation. For example, we have been developing a pilot machine translation system from Japanese to other Asian languages through the cooperation of overseas students. The target languages of the system include Chinese, Mongolian and Japanese sign language (JSL).
Sign languages have no standard written (text) form for the present, and the lack of text form is a major obstacle to natural language processing of sign languages. We are also conducting research on notation systems (writing systems) for JSL and their application to Japanese-JSL machine translation and other software, such as JSPad - a JSL text editor and JSL-Japanese dictionary.