Hitomi Yanaka is a Japanese computational linguist and researcher in natural language processing. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo and a Team Director at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP). After earning her Ph.D. in Information Science and Technology from the University of Tokyo, she has focused her research on natural language understanding, semantic parsing, and natural language inference by integrating machine learning with symbolic logic. Her work aims to develop AI systems capable of understanding the meaning of language in a more human-like way. She is the author of "How Computers Understand Meaning: An Introduction to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing" ("Kotoba no Imi o Keisan Suru Shikumi").