Cross-lingual Comparison of Research Funding Projects with Multilingual Sentence-BERT: Evidence from KAKENHI, NIH, NSF, and UKRI

Abstract

Cross-national comparison of research funding projects is increasingly important for science policy and strategic planning, but language differences remain a major obstacle. In particular, KAKENHI project descriptions are written primarily in Japanese, whereas projects from major overseas funding agencies, such as NSF, NIH, and UKRI, are documented in English. This study investigates whether multilingual sentence embeddings can support meaningful cross-lingual comparison of research funding projects, with particular attention to the semantic effects of translating Japanese texts into English. For each KAKENHI project, we construct two representations: the original Japanese text and its machine-translated English version, both embedded in a shared semantic space using a multilingual Sentence-BERT model. We then compare their distances and nearest-neighbor relationships with respect to projects from English-language funding agencies. The results show that the Japanese and translated English representations of the same KAKENHI project are, on average, located closer to one another than to native English projects, indicating substantial cross-lingual alignment. However, the overlap of nearest neighbors between the two representations is limited, averaging 2.9 out of 10. This suggests that multilingual embeddings capture semantic similarity across languages to a meaningful extent, while language differences and translation still affect the local structure of the embedding space. These findings suggest that multilingual embeddings provide a useful basis for large-scale exploratory comparison of funding projects across countries and agencies. At the same time, they offer an empirical reference for assessing semantic drift when Japanese research project data are translated into English for international analysis.