From Electrophoresis to Wikidata: Festschrift in honor of Pierre Nugues

Abstract

This Festschrift is a tribute to professor Pierre Nugues on the occasion of his 65th birthday. As a professor of Computer Science at the Faculty of Engineering (LTH) at Lund University, Pierre Nugues has made wide-ranging scientific contributions throughout his career. His PhD dissertation was on image processing techniques for the interpretation of two-dimensional electrophoresis gels (Interprétation de gels d’électrophorèses bidimensionnelles, University of Nancy, 1989), but Pierre is known primarily as a contributor to the field of natural language processing (NLP), where he has been active since the early 1990s. His work in this area has always had a practical angle and has often focused on questions related to semantic processing of language. He has made research contributions on fundamental NLP problems such as knowledge extraction, named entity recognition and linking, coreference resolution, and semantic role labeling, and applications such as question answering, dialogue systems, virtual reality therapy and computer-assisted language learning. The research carried out by his team has resulted in the implementation of multilingual NLP tools for tasks such as semantic parsing and named entity linking, which have been widely used and are available as open-source software packages. He has a passion for community-driven projects such as Wikidata and Wikipedia (and is a frequent contributor to Wikipedia), and much of his recent research has been about how NLP technologies can make use of these open resources, and how older lexicons and encyclopedias (such as Nordisk Familjebok, Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and the Petit Larousse illustré) can be linked to modern resources. His wide-ranging contributions are reflected in the title of the volume, From Electrophoresis to Wikidata. Beyond his research, Pierre is also committed to teaching, and he has taught courses in NLP, machine learning and other computer science courses at LTH for many years. He is the author of two textbooks for students of natural language processing: An Introduction to Language Processing with Perl and Prolog and more recently Python for Natural Language Processing: Programming with NumPy, scikit-learn, Keras, and PyTorch, both of which provide hands-on implementations of many well-known models and algorithms used in NLP. These books have been used at his NLP courses at LTH over the years. We are honored to present this Festschrift in recognition of Pierre’s contributions over his career. The Tabula Gratulatoria in this volume includes the names of people in Lund and elsewhere who wish to congratulate him on his birthday. The seven papers included in the Festschrift reflect the breadth of his interests, and they have been contributed by people who have interacted with him over the years. While there are unfortunately no contributions on the interpretation of electrophoresis gels, the papers are on a variety of scientific and pedagogical topics connected to his work. We hope that Pierre will enjoy reading these papers!