Naoya Iwata

Core Member

Associate Professor, Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, Nagoya University

Research Associate, National Institute of Informatics

After earning his Ph.D. in Ancient Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, Dr. Iwata held research fellowships at institutions including the University of Oxford before taking up his current position. While his primary expertise lies in ancient Western philosophy, with a focus on Plato and Aristotle, his recent work has been dedicated to the field of Digital Humanities, where he integrates his research with cutting-edge AI technology to develop new research platforms.

Ancient PhilosophyWestern ClassicsDigital Humanities

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Within the Humanitext project, my role extends beyond the development of individual applications to encompass a wide range of responsibilities, from foundational platform architecture to future development. My key contributions are outlined below.

Platform Operation, Maintenance, and Management
- Overseeing the daily operation, maintenance, and overall management of all applications, including Humanitext Antiqua, Aozora, and OCR, to ensure their stable and reliable performance.
Enhancing Research Support through Advanced Search Capabilities
- Focusing on Antiqua and Aozora, I am dedicated to improving the precision of semantic search. This involves implementing advanced techniques such as hybrid search, context-aware translation, and query expansion to enable researchers to access the information they need more deeply and accurately.
Building and Enriching Research Datasets
- I lead the construction of digital text datasets for classical studies. We are “enriching” existing data (in TEI/XML format) by adding more detailed structural information and expert scholarly interpretations to enhance its value.
- By linking secondary sources like academic papers and commentaries to Antiqua, we are working to generate responses that align more closely with scholarly interpretations, moving beyond simple fact retrieval.
Interdisciplinary Expansion through “Humanitext+”
- I promote the “Humanitext+” initiative, which applies our core technologies to other fields. These efforts include a variety of experimental applications:
  - Integration with Japanese literature and legal databases.
  - Linking classical texts on Greek mythology for use in planetariums.
  - Developing an interactive query system for research reports and papers related to the pyramids.