Matsuo Institute Data Scientist Wins Gold Medal in Kaggle Competition

Yuki Okumura, a data scientist at Matsuo Institute, Inc. (hereinafter "Matsuo Institute"), won a gold medal in the "Deep Past Challenge – Translate Akkadian to English" hosted by Kaggle, the world's largest AI competition. Through this competition, Okumura was certified as the 393rd Competitions Grandmaster in the world. This corresponds to the top 0.2% of approximately 200,000 competitors.

Kaggle is an online platform where participants compete on data analysis and machine learning challenges. Data scientists and statisticians from around the world participate, contributing to the development of AI talent and solving corporate challenges. Many top-level data scientists and machine learning engineers from around the world participated in this competition, and we believe this award is a global recognition of Matsuo Institute's data scientists' creativity and technical capabilities.

**Initiative Details**

This competition required the construction of a model to translate transcribed Old Assyrian (a dialect of Akkadian) into English, targeting cuneiform documents left by ancient Assyrian merchants approximately 4,000 years ago. Participants competed on how accurately they could translate commercial records and letters into English by designing and implementing a translation model that could handle ancient languages with limited data and complex grammar.

**Awardee's Comment**

**Yuki Okumura, Data Scientist, Matsuo Institute, Inc.**

As Akkadian is a low-resource language, expanding the training data was essential. Therefore, we carefully extracted parallel corpora by organizing unstructured PDF data using VLM. Furthermore, we utilized techniques useful for improving the performance of translation models, such as continuous pre-training and the addition of back-translated data, which led to improved accuracy. I hope this competition will further advance the analysis of Akkadian.

Reference article: "Why a Kaggle Master joined Matsuo Institute, capable of solving challenges in various business domains." (https://matsuo-institute.com/recruit-news/2024-12-10/)

**About Recruitment**

Matsuo Institute has top-level data scientists, including Kaggle Grandmasters, who are constantly striving to implement AI in society. We would like to meet those who share our aspirations and want to take on challenges at a higher level. Please feel free to apply from the job openings below. Let's start with a casual interview.

Keywords: AI, Kaggle, Grandmaster, Data Scientist