PhD & Assoc. Prof., Inalco, Paris, France

"The question whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question whether submarines can swim" (E. Dijkstra)

Since september 2014, I am an associate professor at Inalco within ERTIM research team, and head of this team since 2020. My research focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and mixes mathematics (statistics, machine learning), computer sciences (resources and tools) and linguistics (with a special interest in low-resourced languages, for instance lately quechua or bambara).

In 2013/2014, I have been post-doctoral fellow at LIMSI-CNRS (Université Paris-Sud 11), where I was both involved in semantics analysis from speech transcripts (broadcast news and conversation) and natural language processing for estimation of software projects (Systematic project ProjEstimate). In 2012/2013, I was research engineer, in the Alpage team (INRIA), where I studied and implemented systems for automatic acquisition of missing words (neologisms or entities which are missing from lexicon), so as to integrate them into natural language processing systems (ANR project EDyLex).

Previously (2009-2012), I defened a PhD as member of the BDTLN team of the Computer Science Laboratory and teacher of the Computer Science Departement at Francois Rabelais University (France). My advisor was Jean-Yves Antoine and I was also supervised by Arnaud Soulet and Nathalie Friburger as tutors. I mainly worked on Named Entity Recognition (within French broadcast transcripts) using transducers (symbolic rules) and data mining techniques (sequential, hierarchical) as induction mechanism. This work is done in the context of projects as Ester2 or Etape.