Michael Zock

After having completed a PhD in experimental psychology, I was appointed by the CNRS to work at LIMSI, an AI-lab close to Paris (Orsay). In 2006 I moved to southern France (Marseille) to join TALEP, the NLP group of the LIF (université de la Méditerranée).

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 organisational and representational features of the mental lexicon into account;


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.