Chihiro Taguchi is a PhD Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He holds an MSc by Research with Distinction in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (2022), an MA in Engineering from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan (2022), and an LL.B. (Bachelor of Laws) from Keio University, Japan (2019). He also studied linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London as an exchange student.
His primary research interests are human languages. He currently works on natural language processing technologies for endangered languages. In particular, how the process of language documentation can be facilitated by artificial intelligence and how the analysis of languages can be computationally modeled at the levels of phonetics (speech), phonology (mental representation of speech), morphology (word structure), syntax (sentence structure), and semantics (meaning). His previous work involved theoretical syntax of the Tatar language, building linguistic resources for Tatar, and fieldwork on the endangerment of the Ikema dialect of Miyakoan, a Ryukyuan language spoken in Okinawa, Japan, from socio-political perspectives. He received the Grand Prix at the 7th International Olympiad of the Tatar language and Literature (2019) held in Kazan, Russia.