Masao Yokota received a Bachelor degree from Kyushu Institute of Technology, and Master and Doctor degrees from Kyushu University. He is now a professor of informatics at Fukuoka Institute of Technology. His research focus is on AI, especially in integrative multimedia understanding by robots in being as 'natural' as humans where natural language understanding (NLU) plays the central role. He has proposed 'Mental Image Directed Semantic Theory (MIDST)' based on a hypothesis that NLU in humans is mental image processing. MIDST provides an omnisensory mental image model and a formal language called 'Lmd (Language for Mental Image Description)'. This formal language has been already implemented on several versions of the intelligent system IMAGES including integrative multimedia understanding system IMAGES-M and conversation management system CMS. Dr. Yokota has authored numerous articles on AI and was the leader of many projects funded by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT), and Fukuoka Institute of Technology (FIT).
This is an excellent resource for scientists and engineers looking to develop a deep natural language understanding system for application in robotics, currently one of the most critical areas of development for artificial intelligence technologies. The book is very well written and easy to follow for readers with a good background in artificial intelligence or natural language processing. The considerable number of examples and diagrams included make this volume particularly valuable for students. The examples illustrating machine understanding of Japanese offer an exciting bonus for readers engaged in machine translation or computational linguistics. -- J. Brzezinski, McHenry County College, Choice, 2020 Vol. 58 No. 2