Research

Welcome !

I have been a Doctor in Computer Science of University Paris-Sud since June 2010 and a teaching assistant (TA) at the IUT of University Paris-Sud.
My research works take place at the Computer Science for Mechanics and Engineer Sciences Laboratory (LIMSI), among the Architectures and Models for the Interaction (AMI), under the direction of Jean-Paul Sansonnet.
You'll find on this page my research topics, my past publications, a summary of my professional and academical life as well as some informations concerning the other projects I am or have been involved in.

PhD Thesis

Defense

My thesis entitled "Design of a natural language processing chain for an assistant conversational agent" has been defended on Tuesday June 29th 2010 at 2:00pm in the conference room of the LIMSI-CNRS, in front of the following jury members:
  • Guy Lapalme, Professor at Montreal University, RALI (reviewer)
  • Catherine Pelachaud, Research director at LTCI Télécom ParisTech (president)
  • Sylvie Pesty, Professor at University Pierre Mendès-France, LIG (reviewer)
  • Jean-Paul Sansonnet, Research director at LIMSI-CNRS (thesis supervisor)
  • Anne Vilnat, Professor at University Paris-Sud 11, LIMSI-CNRS (examiner)

Summary

With the increasing number of novice users of computer applications, the need for efficient assistance has become critical. To supply the need, we suggest using an Assistant Conversational Agent (ACA), an interface allowing the use of natural language (used spontaneously when a problem arises) and providing a reassuring presence to the users.

A preliminary study details the constitution (combining collection and the use of thesauri) of a corpus of requests, which need is justified. This corpus of 11,626 requests is compared with others, and we show that it covers the studied domain of assistance and moreover, contains requests regarding controlling of the application and chatting with the agent.
This corpus provides a sound foundation for the conception of a syntactico-semantic analyzer of natural language requests, using a set of semantic keys, a set of analysis rules and a set of transformation rules. In output, requests are expressed in a formal language (DAFT) for which we provide the syntax and the semantics.

The analyzer is evaluated by comparing a manual annotation and the requests automatically produced, and we consider the use of some supervised machine learning approaches in order to identify conversational activities.
The methodology followed is validated through the integration of an ACA into an existing Web application for cooperative music prototyping.

Finally, we describe the required architecture for the rational agent in charge of defining the reactions based on the formal requests expressed in DAFT and on the model of the assisted application, emphasizing the need for a cognitive model.

Themes

My research topic is the Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) and particularly their use to provide help to ordinary people using computers. My PhD thesis has started in October 2006 and it takes place in the LIMSI DAFT project, in which I'm interested in the construction of a formal representation for natural language requests semantic and in the definition of canonical heuristics for the rational agent.
I'm collaborating with David Leray who is working on applications symbolic modelization. Our work is supervised by Jean-Paul Sansonnet, creator of the project in 2004.
The following articles describe some specific aspects of my research work:

Resources and demos

DIVA

  • CODIVA demo: in the context of my collaboration with Evandro Miletto Manara, we've been leading experiments in which an assisting agent was embedded into the collaborative music prototyping framework CODES (latest version here)
  • DIVA toolkit: in the context of my works with Mao Xuetao, I've been working on the DIVA framework developped within the AMI group

DAFT

Last modified on: 14/04/2010

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