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)

I am currently an Associate Professor at Inalco (Paris) within the ERTIM team, a position I have held since September 2014. Since 2020, I have served as the Head of the ERTIM Team, managing scientific and administrative resources, and as the Deputy Director of the TIM Teaching Department, where I oversee NLP degree programs and curriculum development. AIn 2024, I was appointed AI Officer for Inalco, where I am responsible for monitoring generative AI capabilities, identifying institutional needs, and implementing AI policies across teaching and research. dditionally, since May 2025, I serve as the CLARIN Ambassador for France, promoting European digital research infrastructures.

My professional path is defined by a deep focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP), starting with my PhD which I defended in 2012 on the topic of Named Entity Recognition. Prior to my current role, I completed a postdoc at LIMSI-CNRS, where I experimented with neural methods for information extraction , and worked as a Research Engineer at INRIA Alpage, developing NLP pipelines for news data. My earlier experience also includes a research engineering role at CEA LIST and several years in the private sector as a consultant and developer specializing in multilingual web engineering and multimedia.

My research focuses on the implementation and exploitation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Artificial Intelligence. I have a strong interest in multilingualism and the development of tools for low-resource languages. My core expertise includes methodologies for processing linguistic data through digitization and annotation , dialogue systems , and named entity recognition and linking. I have applied these research topics to numerous interdisciplinary projects, such as studying oral variations of Armenian , automatic transliteration , and active learning methods for text annotation.