Firstly, thank you for your interest in my group! There are opportunities for both International and Japanese students to come and study at NII in its role as the Department of Information Science of Sokendai - the Graduate University for Advanced Studies. 

I am always interested in supervising highly motivated graduate students who enjoy being productive and creative. The research areas I am interested in supervising are all related to human language technologies (natural language processing, computational linguistics) and broadly include:

• text mining
  
• machine learning for NLP
• knowledge acquisition from (parallel) corpora
• ontology engineering
• argumentative zone analysis
• intelligent information retrieval
• text classification, summarization, sentiment analysis
  

If your interest is not included in the list above but you think it may be related then please also feel free to contact me.

Sokendai provides some quite useful information about scholarships, visas, life in Japan, etc. for International students in their Guide Book. A local copy of their scholarship guide is here. Completed applications for the courses are due around the following times each year:

• for entry in April the following year apply in late July of the previous year if you are privately funded or a Japanese student applying under MEXT's loan scheme;
• for entry in October of the same year apply in mid-January if you want to be funded by a MEXT scholarship;
• for entry in October of the same year apply in mid-June if you are privately funded;

Further sources of information about studying in Japan can be found from The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (in various languages), JASSO, and JPSS.

What to do next

1. First of all I encourage you to take a look at the information, brochure and video about the Informatics Department and the graduate course; it provides an outline of many important points such as the course duration, starting dates, fees, scholarships, faculty, etc.
2. Take a look over my web pages and publications to see what projects we are/have been involved in.
3. Please send me:
   1. your resume (CV)
   2. a short statement of why you are interested in graduate research in general and my group in particular
   3. a copy of a recently published paper or report on your work (if available).
   4. the names and institutions of three people you will be willing to ask for letters of recommendation (usually a supervisor, head of department/dean etc.) - note that it is not necessary to provide the letters of recommendation at this time.

   Please send them by email to collier - at - nii.ac.jp
   

4. I will try to get back to you as soon as possible to discuss your research interests and answer any questions that you have.
5. After discussion if we decide that you could do a successful PhD in my group then we'll go ahead and apply!

JSPS Summer Program

The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science offers an excellent scheme that allows young pre- and post-doctoral researchers from the USA, Canada and Europe to receive orientation in Japanese culture and to work under the guidance of a host researcher in Japan. The period of the program is two months during the summer (late June through August). I am very happy to host young researchers on this program who have an interest in any of the topics listed above - please contact me to discuss this further. Up to date details about the program can be found here.