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 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.

• opensquare A new Inria startup, opensquare, was co-created in December 2016 by BS with 2 senior specialists in HR consulting. opensquare designs, carries out and analyses employee surveys and offers 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 ongoing with Facebook's Parisian FAIR laboratory. In particular, a co-supervised (CIFRE) PhD thesis started in 2018 in collaboration with UNAPEI, the largest French federation of associations defending and supporting people with special needs and their families. This collaboration is expected to pave the way for 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 defines the framework of our collaboration on 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 a post-doc, currently working on the project, and 12 months for a research engineer, which is still to be recruited).

• Science Miner: ALMAnaCH (previously 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.

• Hyperlex A collaboration was initiated in 2018 on NLP for legal documents, involving especially EVdLC.

• ALMAnaCH members led a proposal for the creation of an ANR LabCom with Fortia Financial Solutions, a company specialized in Financial Technology, namely the analysis of financial documents from investment funds. The proposal has been rejected. Meanwhile, this project is currently being extended toward a FUI with Systran, the market leader in specialized machine translation systems, and the BNP as industrial partner. The funding requested will cross the 3 millions euros bar.

• ALMAnaCH members have recently initiated discussions with other companies (Louis Vuitton, Suez...), 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.