Patrick Paroubek, LISN
Motivation for my candidacy to the ELRA board.
After I got my PhD in Computer Science from University Pierre & Marie Curie (1989) on
semantics of programming languages, I shifted to the field of NLP during my post-doctorate at
IRCS (Institute for Research in Cognitive Science) of University Pennsylvania, in A. K. Joshi's
laboratory, where I developed a graphic interface for a Tree Adjoining Grammar parser.
In 1993, I joined, CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Nancy, at INaLF (Institut
National de la Langue Française) to participate to the development of an electronic version of the
"Trésor de la Langue Française", a 20 volumes French language dictionary.
While I was working at INaLF, I got involved in the NLP evaluation activities initiated by Joseph
Mariani in France and met the first time Khalid Choukri, when he was finalizing the submission of his ELRA/ELDA project to the European commission. Early in my career at CNRS, my research work was about corpora and NLP evaluation.
In 1996, I joined LIMSI (Laboratoire pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur), in the
speech processing group, working on dialog systems and evaluation. Three years later I moved to
the text processing group, where I am still working today. Note that the laboratory has changed
name in 2021 to become the LISN (Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique). From the moment ELRA existed, I had regular professional interactions with either ELRA or ELDA on various occasions : collaborating in European projects or for organizing evaluations campaigns,
subcontracting to ELDA for corpora production, providing NLP expert advice, co-authoring papers
on resources and evaluation and attending regularly the LREC conference series (I am proud to be
one of the few who never missed an issue up to now). Furthermore, I have a good experience of
organizing international conferences since I participated in the organization committee of events
like EACL (as publication chair in 2003), TALN (2005 and 2022) and LTC, that I am co-chairing
with Z. Vetulani since 2017. I have also experience in the everyday running of a scientific association since from 2013 to 2020, I was president of the French national association for NLP: ATALA (Association pour le Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel).
Hereby, I pledge myself to be dedicated to the development of NLP in general and to the support of
ELRA activities in particular. By joining the board, I could make ELRA benefit more from my
experience in the field of NLP and from my enthusiasm for promoting, in Europe and worldwide,
natural language resources, evaluation and processing, in the spirit of the LREC conference.
Patrick Paroubek, the 29th of December 2022.
homepage: https://perso.limsi.fr/pap/