Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contracts with Industry

Ongoing contracts:

Verbatim Analysis

Verbatim Analysis is an Inria start-up co-created in 2009 by Benoît Sagot. It uses some of ALMAnaCH's free NLP software (SxPipe) as well as a data mining solution co-developed by Benoît Sagot, VERA, for processing employee surveys with a focus on answers to open-ended questions.

opensquare

was co-created in December 2016 by Benoît Sagot with 2 senior specialists of HR (human resources) 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. This tool being co-owned by opensquare and Inria, both parties have signed a Software Licence Agreement in exchange for a yearly fee paid by opensquare to ALMAnaCH based on its turnover. Benoît Sagot currently contributes to opensquare, under the “Concours scientifique” scheme.

Facebook

A collaboration on text simplification (“français Facile À Lire et à Comprendre”, FALC) is ongoing with Facebook's Parisian FAIR laboratory. It involves 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. This collaboration, is part of a larger initiative called Cap'FALC involving (at least) these three partners as well as the relevant ministries. Funding received as a consequence of the CIFRE PhD thesis: 60,000 euros

Bluenove

A contract with this company has been signed in 2018, which initiated a collaboration for the integration of NLP tools within Bluenove's platform Assembl, dedicated to online employee and citizen debating forums. It involved 12 months of fixed-term contracts (a post-doc, who worked at ALMAnaCH in 2018-2019). Funding received: 77,137 euros

Active collaborations without a contract:

Science Miner

ALMAnaCH (following ALPAGE) has collaborated since 2014 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 for 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 to provide a scholarly dashboard on scientific papers available from the HAL national publication repository.

Software Heritage

, whose goal is to collect and preserve software in source code form. ALMAnaCH's collaboration with Software Heritage, on large-scale programming language identification, also involves Qwant, who provided some funding to Software Heritage.

Fortia Financial Solutions

ALMAnaCH members led a proposal for the creation of an ANR LabCom with this French FinTech company on the analysis of (raw, PDF) financial documents from investment funds. The proposal was rejected, but future collaboration is still planned.

Hyperlex

A collaboration was initiated in 2018 on NLP and information extraction from raw legal documents (mostly PDF format), involving especially Éric de La Clergerie, who is now a part-time employee of the company.

Ongoing discussions that should/could be formalised in the form of a contract in 2020:

Winespace

: information extraction from wine descriptions to develop a wine recommendation system

Newsbridge

: automatic extraction of short summaries of filmed events (e.g. sport events) based on social media coverage analysis

INPI

: Patent classification

Cour de cassation

(in the context of the LabIA): retrieval of relevant jurisprudence

DGCCRF

(in the context of the LabIA): automatic identification of illicit clauses in B-to-C commercial contracts