I’m Wataru Hirota, an NLP enthusiast.

As a Research Manager at Stockmark Inc., I lead the research team while also conducting my own research and development. Currently, I am engaged in R&D on AI for Innovation, particularly focusing on application-discovery AI that connects manufacturing technologies with new business opportunities. For more details, please see About me or contact at hello@whiro.me .
Paper featured on Stockmark and AIST Solutions websites
June 26, 2026

Our ACL 2026 paper, “Aggregate vs. Personalized Judges in Business Idea Evaluation: Evidence from Expert Disagreement,” was featured on the websites of Stockmark and AIST Solutions.

Published tech blog: "Are We Asking LLM-as-a-Judge for a Single Right Answer?"
June 14, 2026

(In Japanese) I wrote an article on Stockmark’s tech blog titled “Are We Asking LLM-as-a-Judge for a Single Right Answer? (LLM-as-a-Judge に「唯一の正解」を求めすぎていないか?)”. It analyzes the diversity of expert evaluations in business idea assessment and discusses a human-centered evaluation design where humans decide which perspective to adopt and models handle the evaluation from that perspective. The post explains our paper accepted to the ACL 2026 Industry Track.

Paper accepted to ACL 2026 Industry Track (Oral)
April 28, 2026

Our paper was accepted to the ACL 2026 Industry Track as an oral presentation. Aggregate vs. Personalized Judges in Business Idea Evaluation: Evidence from Expert Disagreement. arXiv.

Organizing an OS on Generative AI and Knowledge Graphs at JSAI2026
April 26, 2026

I will serve as an organizer for the organized session OS-37 “Generative AI and Knowledge Graphs” at the 40th Annual Conference of JSAI (JSAI2026), to be held in June 2026. The session is co-organized with Prof. Kouji Kozaki (Osaka Electro-Communication University), Prof. Takeshi Morita (Aoyama Gakuin University), and Shigeri Kurokawa (KDDI Research). We look forward to your submissions and participation.

Presenting at NLP2026
March 16, 2026

I am attending the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing (NLP2026), held in Nagasaki, March 2026. I also co-authored a blog post introducing the five research papers our team at Stockmark is presenting at the conference: Natural Language Processing Supporting Seeds-Needs Matching.

Contributed to a Book on Materials Informatics and AI
February 13, 2026

AndTech has published Materials Informatics & AI: A Collection of Real-World Material Development Case Studies for Immediate Practical Use and the Future of MI. I contributed to the review of Section 7.3, “Development of Generative AI Technology for Improving Accuracy and Efficiency in New Business Creation.”

Attending the Japan Marketing Association Conference
January 20, 2026

I will attend the Japan Marketing Association’s Multi-City Conference in Osaka on February 28, 2026. Looking forward to discussions with attendees on site.

Speaking at a Seminar
January 19, 2026

I will be speaking at a seminar hosted by Stockmark Inc.: “Why Can’t RAG Find That ‘Tacit Knowledge’? Formalizing Knowledge by Connecting Figures and Context with VLM × Knowledge Graph”. URL

Published note article: "Is LLM-based Public Opinion Polling Possible?"
December 15, 2025

(In Japanese) I wrote an article titled “Is LLM-based Public Opinion Polling Possible? (LLM世論調査は可能なのか?)” discussing the possibilities and current state of LLM-based simulation.

Organizing the Mirai NLP Workshop
November 14, 2025

I will serve as an organizer for the Mirai NLP Workshop (in Japanese), to be held at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing (NLP2026) (in Japanese) in March 2026. I will mainly be in charge of the Shared Task. Details and registration are available here (in Japanese).