News on Wataru Hirota

Paper featured on Stockmark and AIST Solutions websites

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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?"

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

(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 published on arXiv

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We published a paper proposing a model editing approach to align language models with expert judgment in subjective evaluation tasks. This is joint work with Lin, Ishigaki (AIST), Lee, and Chen.

Why Expert Alignment Is Hard: Evidence from Subjective Evaluation. arXiv.

Paper accepted to ACL 2026 Industry Track (Oral)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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?"

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

(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

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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).

Our collaboration with AIST Solutions was published

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Bibbidi open innovation platform—where I contributed to building the knowledge-graph data— was featured on AIST’s website (in Japanese). An exhibition at CEATEC 2025 @ Makuhari Messe is also planned.

Hosted the PBIG Shared Task

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At the AgentScen workshop at IJCAI 2025 in Montréal, we hosted the Product Business Idea Generation (PBIG) Shared Task.

Paper accepted to SIGDIAL 2025

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Our paper was accepted to SIGDIAL 2025. This work is a collaboration with Ueda (AIST RA), Ishigaki (AIST), and Stockmark.

Exploring Design of Multi-Agent LLM Dialogues for Research Ideation. arXiv.