Maxime Amblard

Timeline

1. 2000–2008

   Bordeaux PhD and Orange Labs

   He earns degrees in mathematics and computer science at Université Bordeaux 1 from 2000 to 2003, then completes a PhD at LaBRI in 2007 on categorial minimalist grammars, supervised by Christian Retoré and Alain Lecomte. From 2007 to 2008, he is a postdoctoral researcher in the EASY/LN team at Orange Labs in Lannion.

2. 2008–2015

   Lecturer at LORIA

   In 2008, he becomes a maître de conférences (lecturer) at the Université de Lorraine, attached to LORIA and the mathematics and computer science faculty. From 2013 to 2015, he works full time at Inria Nancy Grand-Est in the Sémagramme team.

3. Since 2011

   The SLAM project on schizophrenia

   Since 2011, he leads SLAM (Schizophrénie et Langage : Analyse et Modélisation), which studies conversations with people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder by combining psychology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy. Within SLAM, he organizes four editions of the international workshop (In)Coherence of Discourse. Work on SLoDIM, software for clinicians that automatically analyzes dialogue transcripts, begins in 2015.

4. 2015–2016

   Ethics research and a habilitation

   In 2015, he begins research on the ethics of natural language processing with Karën Fort, work that extends to ethical questions in AI. He earns his habilitation (HDR) at the Université de Lorraine in 2016 for work on semantics and discourse, sponsored by Philippe de Groote, and starts Fr-FraCaS, a French translation of the FraCaS collection of inference problems.

5. 2019–2023

   ODiM and MePheSTO

   From 2019 to 2022, he is scientific lead of ODiM, an Inria exploratory action on computer tools to help diagnose mental illness. From 2020 to 2023, he co-leads the French side of MePheSTO with François Bremond, an Inria–DFKI project that uses AI methods to identify measurable digital phenotypes of psychiatric disorders from patient–clinician interactions.

6. 2022–2023

   Depression detection and discourse structure

   With Chuyuan Li and Chloé Braud, he coauthors a 2022 SIGDIAL paper on multi-task learning for depression detection in dialogues, which reports up to 70.6% F1. In a Findings of EACL 2023 paper with Li, Patrick Huber, Wen Xiao, Braud and Giuseppe Carenini, the team infers discourse structures for dialogues from the attention matrices of pre-trained language models.

7. Since 2022

   Full professor at Lorraine

   He becomes a professeur des universités (full professor) at the Université de Lorraine in 2022, attached to LORIA and the mathematics and computer science faculty. In January 2024, he joins philosopher of science Daniel Andler and data science manager Annabelle Blangero in a Polytechnique Insights piece on whether artificial and human intelligence are comparable.

8. Since 2025

   Leading the INSIGHT initiative

   Since 2025, he leads INSIGHT, a four-year Lorraine Initiative of Excellence project that links the humanities, social sciences and law with AI and natural language processing, and he presents it at its kick-off meeting in December 2025. He is a professor of computer science at the Université de Lorraine, directs the master's program in natural language processing at IDMC, and studies the semantics of spontaneous dialogue at LORIA.