The University of La Rochelle is a French higher education and research institution founded in 1993, represented in NewsEye by the L3i laboratory (Laboratoire Informatique, Image et Interaction).
The L3i is specialised in the study of digital documents that are produced by humans and meant for humans. The group involved is specialised in the development of robust methods for the analysis of text written in any language, regardless of potential noise stemming from the digitisation process.
The University of La Rochelle is coordinating the project and is in charge of the work package that deals with the semantic enrichment of newspapers in any language: named entity recognition and liking, polarity, event detection.It operates in a multilingual, potentially noisy and massive setting.
Team Biographies
Antoine Doucet
Project Coordinator
Prof. Antoine Doucet is a tenured Full Professor at the L3i laboratory of the University of La Rochelle since 2014. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University in Helsinki in 2005, and holds a French habilitation (HDR) since 2012.
Antoine's main research interests lie in the fields of information retrieval (structured and semi-structured) and natural language processing. In particular, the central focus of his work is on the development of methods that scale to very large document collections and that do not require prior knowledge of the data (in particular, techniques that function for documents written in any language). Antoine holds a grant for scientific excellence from the French government since 2013 and has obtained several best papers awards (best paper in 2015 for an AIIM journal paper on multilingual event detection, out of 1,272 candidates; and best HCI paper at HCI International 2014). He runs several projects at the University of La Rochelle around the robust semantic analysis of multilingual documents. A. Doucet has been involved in the international workshop on Histoinformatics since its first occurrence in 2013. He has launched and organized several international competitions and benchmarks at the crossroad of statistical natural language processing and document analysis (INEX and CLEF Book Search 2007-2013, ICDAR Book Structure extraction 2009, 2011 and 2013, ICDAR Post-OCR correction 2017).
Dr. Mickaël Coustaty
Dr. Mickaël Coustaty is a tenured Associate Professor at the L3i laboratory of the University of La Rochelle since 2015. He obtained a PhD in computer science in 2011 from University of La Rochelle, France on historical document images analysis and indexing. His main research interests are related to digital humanities, working with history scholars on the one hand, and combining semantic and image processing for fraud detection in administrative documents on the other. He published more than 50 papers and organized various international competitions. Recently, he managed Tourinfluxa large national project on touristic information analysis (4 partners, € 2.3M), and he currently leads a European project (ERA-NET CHIST-ERA SPIRIT) and two national projects (ERDF SECURDOC PC445 and ERDF SeAD PC528) related to fraud detection and content securing (around € 2M in total).
Axel Jean-Caurant
Dr Axel Jean-Caurant is a research engineer at the L3i laboratory of the University of La Rochelle. He obtained his PhD in computer science in 2018 where his thesis was on the accessibility of documents inside digital libraries.
The focus of his work was put on two distinct aspects. First is to understand how researchers are using these online platforms and how to train them to understand the changes data has undergone during the digitisation processes. Second is the study of the impact of the quality of documents on accessibility. Axel is now working full time on the NewsEye project and is in charge of developing the demonstrator which will hold the data researchers of the project are interested in, along with the different tools developed during the project
Dr. Elvys Linhares Pontes
Dr. Elvys Linhares Pontes is a postdoctoral researcher at the L3i laboratory of the University of La Rochelle since September 2019. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2018 from the University of Avignon (France) on Natural Language Processing and Cross-Language Text Summarization.
His current research focus is on the Named Entity Recognition and Linking. Elvys is working part time in the NewsEye project and part time in the EMBEDDIA project.
Dr. Ahmed Hamdi
Dr. Ahmed Hamdi is a postdoctoral researcher at the L3i laboratory of the University of La Rochelle since September 2019. He obtained a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing from Aix-Marseille University (France) in 2015 (France) on Natural Language Processing. His thesis was about the POS-tagging of poor-resource languagesusing NLP tools and resources of closely related rich-resource languages. Ahmed is working part-time in the NewsEye project. His work focuses on Named Entity Recognition and Stance Detection.