Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

ALMAnaCH is a follow-up to the ALPAGE project-team, which came to an end at the end of December 2016. ALPAGE was created in 2007 in collaboration with Paris-Diderot University and had the status of an UMR-I since 2009. This joint team involving computational linguists from Inria as well as Paris-Diderot computational linguists with a strong background in linguistics proved successful. However, the context is changing, with the recent emergence of digital humanities and, more importantly, of computational humanities. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge for Inria computational linguists. It provides them with new types of data on which their tools, resources and algorithms can be used and lead to new results in human sciences. Computational humanities also provide computational linguists with new and challenging research problems, which, if solved, provide new ways of studying human sciences.

ALMAnaCH’s scientific positioning therefore extends ALPAGE’s. We remain committed to developing state-of-the-art natural language processing software and resources that can be used by academics and in the industry, including recent approaches based on deep learning. At the same time we continue our work on language modelling in order to provide a better understanding of languages, an objective that is now reinforced and addressed in the broader context of computational humanities, with an emphasis on language evolution and, as a result, on ancient languages.

This new scientific orientation has motivated the creation of a new project-team with a new partner, namely the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). The EPHE is a leading institution in France in human sciences in general and in digital and computational humanities in particular. Two EPHE research directors, who have already been working together for some time in computational humanities, will be permanent members of the project-team: a philologist and a computer scientist, both specialists of computational approaches to philology and ancient language studies, in line with the above-mentioned scientific positioning.