NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL

Caroline Barrière
Research Officer

Caroline obtained a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Simon Fraser University, in addition to a master's degree in Electrical Engineering and a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the École Polytechnique de Montréal. She was Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa's School of Information and Technology Engineering (SITE) for six years, where her work focused on computational terminology and lexicography. While at SITE, she also supervised students who were working in areas such as speech recognition and measuring word similarity in textual corpora.

In addition, Caroline participated in the creation of the University of Ottawa's Groupe de recherche en ingénierie de la langue (GRIL), where she began research in computer-assisted language learning. In September 2003, Caroline began working at the National Research Council's Institute for Information Technology (NRC-IIT), conducting research in the area of automated translation and computer-assisted translation.

Over the past ten years, Caroline has acquired a large amount of experience in the study of semantics, including word sense disambiguation, the notion of similarity and distance between concepts, conceptual hierarchies and ontology, the creation of semantic fields, the impact of semantics on the understanding of language, and the difficulty of extracting semantic information from texts.

George Foster
Research Officer

With over ten years of experience in the study of applied computational linguistics, George has a PhD in Computer Science from Université de Montréal and holds a Master's of Science from McGill University. He also worked as a researcher in the Traduction Assistée par Ordinateur (TAO) group at the Centre for Information Technology Innovation, Industry Canada. He then performed research at the Laboratoire de recherche appliquée en linguistique informatique (RALI) at Université de Montréal. While there, George was involved in TransType2, a European Union 5th framework project to produce a prototype text prediction tool for translators and participated in a machine translation evaluation forum. With RALI, George's work spanned the areas of confidence estimation, interactive text prediction, language modeling, cross-language information retrieval and automatic language identification. He also worked as Senior Software Designer with AmikaNow! Corporation, developing confidence-based techniques for automatic classification of e-mail messages. Most recently, in the summer of 2003, George led a research workshop on confidence estimation for machine translation at the Centre for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University.

Pierre Isabelle
Group Leader, Interactive Language Technologies Group

Before joining the Interactive Language Technologies Group of NRC as Group Leader, Dr. Isabelle managed the Content Analysis group of Xerox Research Centre Europe (Grenoble, France). He holds a Ph.D. in computational linguistics and started his research career in 1975 as a member of the TAUM machine translation group at the Université de Montréal. Between 1985 and 1996, he was in charge of the machine-aided translation team of CITI, a research laboratory of the Canadian Department of Industry. In 1997 he returned to the Université de Montréal as head of the RALI laboratory of the computer science department, until he joined Xerox Research Centre Europe in 1999.

In addition, Dr. Isabelle is author of numerous scientific publications in machine-aided translation and natural language processing. He is currently serving as the editor of the 'Squibs and Discussions' section of the Computational Linguistics journal and as a member of the editorial board of the Machine Translation journal. He organized several international scientific conferences, including COLING-ACL'98 and ACL-02, and he is a member of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL). Dr. Isabelle is also an Associate Professor at the computer science department of Université de Montréal.

Roland Kuhn
Research Officer

After studying mathematical modeling in biology (including research on DNA evolution models), Roland developed an interest in natural language. In 1993, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from McGill University, with a thesis on applying decision trees to the understanding of spoken phrases.

In the course of his research career, Roland has contributed on various levels to voice recognition systems, such as language models (cache model) and adaptation (eigenvoices).

After working at the Centre de recherche informatique de Montréal (CRIM) as both a researcher and a senior researcher, Roland held research and development positions with the Panasonic Speech Technology Laboratory in Santa Barbara, California from October 1996 to June 2004. He has been with the LTRC since July 2004. A holder of both Canadian and German citizenship, Roland holds 21 patents and has been a member of the IEEE Speech Technical Committee since November 2002.

Michel Mellinger
Business Development Officer

Before joining the National Research Council as Business Development Officer for the new Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC), Michel was responsible for the management of R&D and innovation in several organizations.

Michel comes to the LTRC from the geomatics sector. Most recently, he was Senior Advisor with the GeoConnections program of Natural Resources Canada, where he was involved in policy and partnership development. From 2000 to 2002, Michel was President and CEO of 3i (Information Interoperability Institute) in Hull. From 1998 to 2000, he was President and CEO of the Centre de développement de la géomatique (CDG) in Quebec City. From 1994 to 1998, he was Director of Programs and Contracts with CRESTech (Centre for Research in Earth and Space Technology), one of the Ontario Centres of Excellence, located in Toronto. While he was there he was responsible for managing operations, planning and evaluating the R&D program, and commercializing technology produced through R&D projects.

Prior to that, Michel worked at the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) in Saskatoon, where he began his career in R&D and innovation management in 1986. He was primarily responsible for SRC's Environmental Technology Division and established the SRC technology commercialization function.

Before focusing on his interest in R&D and innovation management, Michel had a successful career in applied research, first at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, then at the SRC, in the fields of geology, geochemistry, mineral exploration, and the multidimensional statistical analysis of various types of data.

Michel obtained an M.Sc. in Structural Chemistry from Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg (France), and an M.Sc.A. in Geology from the École Polytechnique de Montréal. He is also a graduate of the Banff School of Management.

David Nadeau
Programmer-Analyst

David has a master's degree in Computer Science from Université Laval. His fields of specialization are machine learning and multilingual information extraction (in English, French, Spanish, and German). His work experience includes four years at Copernic Technologies, where he was head researcher for the Copernic Summarizer project.

Patrick Paul
System Support Specialist
NRC

Patrick joined the Interactive Language Technologies Group of the National Research Council in November 2003 as the system support specialist. Previously, Patrick worked for Solectron in the Eastern Townships as a software designer. Patrick has a background in system support and network applications.