Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Industrial Collaborations

• Verbatim Analysis: this Inria start-up was co-created in 2009 by BS. It uses some of ALPAGE/ALMAnaCH’s free NLP software (SxPipe) as well as a data mining solution co-developed by BS, VERA, for processing employee surveys with a focus on answers to open-ended questions. A new Inria startup, opensquare, was co-created in December 2016 by BS with 2 senior specialists of HR consulting. It is dedicated to designing, carrying out and analysing employee surveys as well as HR consulting based on these results. It uses a new employee survey analysis tool, enqi, which is still under development.

• Facebook: A collaboration on text simplification (“français Facile À Lire et à Comprendre”, FALC) is starting with Facebook's Parisian FAIR laboratory. It should start with a co-supervised (CIFRE) PhD thesis in collaboration with UNAPEI, the largest French federation of associations defending and supporting people with special needs and their families (the CIFRE application has just been submitted). This collaboration is expected to be part of a larger initiative involving (at least) these three partners as well as the relevant ministries.

• Bluenove: A contract with this company has been signed, which initiates a collaboration in the integration of NLP tools (e.g. chatbot-related modules) within Bluenove's plateform Assembl, dedicated to online citizen debating forums. It involves a total of 24 months of fixed-term contracts (12 months for an engineer and 12 months for a research ingineer).

• Science Miner: ALMAnaCH (following ALPAGE) has been collaborating since 2014 years with this company founded by Patrice Lopez, a specialist in machine learning techniques and initiator of the GROBID and NERD (now entity-fishing) suites. Patrice Lopez provides scientific support on the corresponding software components in the context of the Parthenos, EHRI and Iperion projects, as well as in the context of the Inria anHALytics initiative, aiming at providing a scholarly dashboard on the scientific papers available from the HAL national publication repository.

• Konverso: A collaboration with this start-up is starting, focused on chatbots and text generation. One of our objectives with this collaborations is to initiate a larger initiative involving ALMAnaCH and several small companies, whose goal will be the development of open-source, NLP-enhanced chatbot modules. This is because such developments are complex and would benefit from such a mutualisation initiative. In turn, an open-source chatbot engine would allow startups and ALMAnaCH to more rapidly develop and deploy high-performance application-specific chatbots. The first concrete outcome of this collaboration is our joint submission to the call for projects published by the DILA (French government agency) for exploring the relevance of deploying a chatbot on the public information plateform service-public.fr.

• There exists at least one formal collaboration between a company and EPHE involving future ALMAnaCH members. It involves Insight-Signals, an EPHE start-up that “designs data analytics and decision support systems that integrate the complexity of humans' behaviour and their interactions”.

• Trooclick: A direct and active collaboration with this company is now strengthened by the “RAPID” ANR project VerDI on the automatic detection of omissions in news reports and other types of texts. This project will come to an end in February 2018.

• ALMAnaCH members have recently initiated discussions with other companies (Fujitsu, HyperLex, Fortia Financial Solutions...), so that additional collaborations might start in the near future. They have also presented their work to companies interested in knowing more about the activities of Inria Paris in AI and NLP (Google, Toyota, Samsung...).