Michael Zock

After having completed my PhD in experimental psychology, I was appointed by the CNRS to work at LIMSI, an AI-lab close to Paris (Orsay). I stayed for 20 years before moving 2006 to southern France (Marseille) to join TALEP, the NLP group of the LIF (Aix-Marseille Université).

My research interests lie in language production by and large. Starting from user needs and empirical findings I try to build tools helping people to acquire the skill of speaking or writing. My current research foci comprise:

1. Message-planning: creation of a conceptual interface, (i.e. linguistically motivated ontology augmented with a graph generator) to help people compose their thoughts;


2. Outline-planning: help authors to perceive possible links between their ideas or thoughts in order to produce coherent discourse;


3. Lexical access: improve navigation in electronic dictionaries by taking peoples’ search strategies and certain features of the mental lexicon into account, in particular, the words' organisation and representation;


4. Acquisition of basic syntactic structures, i.e. verbal skill / fluency in order to survive abroad. Building of a self-extending, multilingual phrasebook augmented with an exercise generator.