Télécom Paris, an engineering school specializing in digital technology, and onepoint, a French company specializing in digital transformation, will be launching a research laboratory together. Called TALia, it will be dedicated to natural language processing with the aim of humanizing relations with machines. The laboratory will be inaugurated at the end of June.

A partnership to create a research laboratory for natural language processing

Thanks to a partnership, Télécom Paris and onepoint will together be creating TALia, which aims to combine the business and scientific expertise of onepoint’s staff with the research skills of Télécom Paris in automatic natural language processing (NLP). This laboratory will focus its work on three issues:

• Putting humans at the center of AI: language is the hallmark of mankind and has enabled civilization. Today, interacting with machines through language is a major challenge for AI and carries a huge ambition: to humanize our relationships with machines.
• Maintaining linguistic sovereignty: the challenge is to have authority and control over the data sets used to train automatic language processing models. Retaining sovereignty ensures the control of our digital chain and the defence of the French language.
• Transmit knowledge: the empowerment of a society depends on the empowerment of its individuals and their training. Contributing to the transmission of contemporary knowledge such as that of automatic language processing will enable Télécom Paris and onepoint to be, in their own way, players in democracy.

Gontran Peubez, Partner, and Pirmin Lemberger, Scientific Director at onepoint, refer to the partnership between the two institutions:

“The partnership with Télécom Paris will enable onepoint to develop a high-level research activity in the field of NLP, at the intersection of industrial and scientific issues: combining Deep Learning, graph theory, symbolic AI, and linguistics. We will thus be able to train students in scientific and technical courses in the latest advances in NLP and provide pragmatic answers to our clients who are keen to take advantage of these emerging technologies, and this in the language of Molière.”

The TALia laboratory will be inaugurated on June 30

Capitalizing on the scientific advances generated by the creation of intellectual property and technology transfer: this is the ambition of this new laboratory, which will be inaugurated on June 30, at 5:30 p.m., at onepoint’s premises, but also live on YouTube.

Sylvain Lamblot, Director of Development and Partnerships at Télécom Paris, talks about the creation of the laboratory:

“The joint laboratory is one of the most successful forms of collaboration between Télécom Paris and its partners. Onepoint has understood that research is the fuel for innovation and dares to invest in long timeframes, particularly in research.”

Muriel Touaty, Education and Innovation Partner, and Renaud Mignerey, onepoint’s R&D program pilot, state:

“TALia is a collaboration that is all the more ambitious because it is co-constructed and co-directed by Télécom Paris and onepoint around a research topic with shared human, material and budgetary resources. As onepoint is already a sponsor of the Télécom Paris Class of 2023, TALia is an opportunity to strengthen our links and position our activities as a link between research, innovation and education.”

The laboratory will program its work over a five-year cycle and aims to support four to five theses around NLP.

Translated from TALia : le laboratoire de recherche de onepoint et Télécom Paris autour du traitement du langage naturel