Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

LabEx EFL (Empirical Foundations of Linguistics) (2011 – 2021)

Participants : Laurence Danlos, Benoît Sagot, Chloé Braud, Marie Candito, Benoît Crabbé, Pascal Denis, Charlotte Roze, Pierre Magistry, Djamé Seddah, Juliette Thuilier, Éric Villemonte de La Clergerie.

Linguistics and related disciplines addressing language have achieved much progress in the last two decades but improved interdisciplinary communication and interaction can significantly boost this positive trend. The LabEx (excellency cluster) EFL (Empirical Foundations of Linguistics), launched in 2011 and head by Jacqueline Vaissière, opens new perspectives by adopting an integrative approach. It groups together some of the French leading research teams in theoretical and applied linguistics, in computational linguistics, and in psycholinguistics. Through collaborations with prestigious multidisciplinary institutions (CSLI, MIT, Max Planck Institute, SOAS...) the project aims at contributing to the creation of a Paris School of Linguistics, a novel and innovative interdisciplinary site where dialog among the language sciences can be fostered, with a special focus on empirical foundations and experimental methods and a valuable expertise on technology transfer and applications.

Alpage is a very active member of the LabEx EFL together with other linguistic teams we have been increasingly collaborating with: LLF (University Paris 7 & CNRS) for formal linguistics, LIPN (University Paris 13 & CNRS) for NLP, LPNCog (University Paris 5 & CNRS) LSCP (ENS, EHESS & CNRS) for psycholinguistics, MII (University Paris 4 & CNRS) for Iranian and Indian studies. Alpage resources and tools have already proven relevant for research at the junction of all these areas of linguistics, thus drawing a preview of what the LabEx is about: experimental linguistics (see Section  4.8 ). Moreover, the LabEx should provide Alpage with opportunities for collaborating with new teams, e.g., on language resource development with descriptive linguists (INALCO, for example).

Benoît Sagot is in charge of one of the 7 scientific “strands” of the LabEx EFL, namely the strand on Language Resources. Several other project members are in charge of research operations within 3 of these 7 strands (“Experimental grammar from a crosslinguistic perspective”, “Computational semantic analysis”, “Language Resources”).