Jean Véronis

Timeline

1. 1955–1988

   A doctorate on dialogue errors

   Born in Toulon in 1955, he completes a PhD at Aix-Marseille University in 1988 with a thesis on errors in natural-language human–machine dialogue. In 1988, he presents a paper on morphosyntactic correction in natural language interfaces at COLING in Budapest.

2. 1990–1992

   Neural networks for word senses

   In 1990, he and Nancy M. Ide present "Word Sense Disambiguation with Very Large Neural Networks Extracted from Machine Readable Dictionaries" at COLING. He teaches for several years in the United States, notably at Vassar College. In 1992, he and Ide, then at the CNRS and Vassar College respectively, present "Outline of a Model for Lexical Databases" at the ACH/ALLC conference in Oxford.

3. 1994–1998

   MULTEXT and a disambiguation survey

   In 1994, he and Ide present "MULTEXT: Multilingual Text Tools and Corpora" at COLING in Kyoto, and in 1995 they publish the book Text Encoding Initiative: Background and Context. He helps draft Text Encoding Initiative proposals for the semantic encoding of dictionaries. In 1998, he and Ide write the introduction to a Computational Linguistics special issue, "Word Sense Disambiguation: The State of the Art".

4. 2000–2008

   Parallel texts and ATALA

   At the Université de Provence, he edits Parallel Text Processing: Alignment and Use of Translation Corpora, published by Kluwer in 2000. A chapter he writes with Philippe Langlais describes ARCADE, a project that evaluates parallel-text alignment systems at the sentence and word level. From 2000 to 2008, he is president of the Association pour le traitement automatique des langues (ATALA).

5. 2003–2005

   HyperLex and Google counts

   In 2003, he presents HyperLex at the 10th Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles conference in Batz-sur-Mer. The algorithm finds the different uses of a word in a text collection without a dictionary by detecting high-density components of the word co-occurrence graph. In January 2005, his blog post "Web: Googlean logic" argues that the result counts Google displays are impossible.

6. 2006–2008

   Blogging on political language

   Le Monde lists his blog among the 15 most influential in 2006. During the 2007 French presidential election, he studies the candidates' language and puts tools online to follow the campaign, including a search engine for their speeches. With Louis-Jean Calvet, he co-writes the books Combat pour l'Élysée in 2006 and Les Mots de Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008.

7. September 2008

   Directing Wikio Labs

   In September 2008, Wikio founder Pierre Chappaz announces Wikio Labs, a research lab that Véronis, a professor of computer science and linguistics at the university in Aix-en-Provence, is to direct. The lab aims to improve the results of the Wikio news search engine, working with the Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille and other labs.

8. 2013

   Co-founding Trendsboard

   In January 2013, he creates the start-up Trendsboard with Benoît Raphaël, Thomas Mahier and Julien Tauvel; its tool detects trends, keywords and topics on social networks and Google in real time. In February 2013, the company raises €500,000 from Belgian business angels. He dies in an accident in September 2013.