Moe Nakamura, Researcher at Pola Chemical Industries, Receives Excellent Presentation Award at Japan Kansei Engineering Society

Pola Chemical Industries Inc. (Headquarters: Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture; President: Takayuki Katagiri), responsible for research, development, and production within the Pola Orbis Group, announces that researcher Moe Nakamura received an Excellent Presentation Award at the 21st Spring Conference of the Japan Kansei Engineering Society. Her presentation, which proposed a new method to leverage consumers' "free-form language" expressions of tactile sensation by linking them with physical property data for product design, was highly praised. Currently, efforts are underway to apply this method to cosmetic product design.

[Award-winning Presentation Title]
"Contrastive Learning of Tactile Impressions and Physical Characteristics Based on Free-Form Description Data - Connecting 'Free Words' Conveying Tactile Sensation to Design -"

[Key Points of the Award-winning Research]
Tactile sensation is a crucial factor in many products. While consumers express their sensory impressions with natural language such as "feels like melting smoothly like snow," development sites need to translate these into component-separated "evaluation words" or "physical property values" to reflect them in product design. This connection often requires immense effort. Furthermore, subtle nuances and contexts could potentially be lost in this process.

Therefore, this research proposed a contrastive learning method that handles language and physical properties within the same framework, by converting data expressing tactile sensations of various everyday items in free-form descriptions into quantifiable numerical data (Figure 1).

[Research Achievements]
Proposed "contrastive learning," a method to quantitatively capture tactile sensations by treating free-form descriptions (e.g., "feels like melting smoothly like snow") as numerical data, integrating language and physical properties within a single framework.
Enabled estimation of physical property values from free-form descriptions, and identification of items with similar tactile sensations.
Confirmed that subtle nuances and contextual information, which are difficult to capture with evaluation words, can be reflected.

This method advances the foundation for extracting tactile needs that previously tended to be overlooked and for applying tactile sensations to design. In the future, by utilizing free-form descriptions from reviews and social media posts, it is expected to lead to grasping latent market needs and enhancing design support.

[Award Recipient]
(Refer to supplementary materials)
Moe Nakamura
Researcher, Frontier Research Center, Pola Chemical Industries
Joined Pola Chemical Industries in 2025 and is engaged in Kansei (sensory) research. Interested in Kansei, brain and central nervous system, and interoception, she is working on research that leads to understanding consumers.

[Recipient's Comment]
In this research, we viewed "free-form language" as a treasure trove of sensory information and proposed a new framework for handling diverse tactile sensations in the world, linking them with physical properties. Moving forward, based on this knowledge, we aim to further develop our research by focusing more on the delicate tactile sensations unique to cosmetics and their usage contexts.

Pola Chemical Industries, under the group philosophy of "fully engaging the switch of sensibility," will contribute to the development of beauty and communication through research that goes beyond the boundaries of cosmetics.

[Supplementary Material 1] About the Award-winning Presentation
■ Presenters and Affiliations
Moe Nakamura 1, Kentaro Nomura 2, Koji Mizukoshi 1, Takaya Oishi 1, Toshiki Ikejima 1, Ryuto Horii 2,3
1: Pola Chemical Industries Inc. / 2: Osaka University / 3: The University of Tokyo IRCN

■ Supplementary Information on Research Content
"Tactile sensation" is a crucial point that influences whether consumers want to continue using a cosmetic product. Cosmetics come into direct contact with the skin and are used daily. Therefore, not only the effects of ingredients but also the sensation itself directly correlates with satisfaction. Furthermore, when tactile sensation matches the product's function, it enhances conviction and trust, leading to an improvement in value as a brand experience.

In this research, we aimed to treat both free-form descriptions (language) and physical property data within the same representational space by using contrastive learning to bring them closer together. The free-form description model using the Japanese embedding model "PLaMo" showed higher performance in zero-shot estimation (estimation under conditions not included in training) compared to models using evaluation words.

■ Collaborative Research Bringing Evolution to Sensory Research from the Perspective of Cognitive Developmental Robotics
Pola Chemical Industries has been conducting collaborative research with Osaka University since October 2025. Associate Professor Ryuto Horii of the Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, studies the developmental principles of human emotional functions and tactile communication. In this joint research, a new interdisciplinary approach combining sensory research and robotics is being explored from the perspective of cognitive developmental robotics. This achievement is one of the fundamental insights for modeling abstract expressions in text.

This perspective brings new breadth to sensory research in cosmetics. By breaking down the elements and processes through which people form perceptions and understanding them from their origins, it is expected to serve as a new approach to modeling perceptions for diverse experiences, including cosmetic acts.

Reference Website
Osaka University Graduate School of Engineering Science
(Social Robotics