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Dr. Dominique Dutoit
Managing director
MEMODATA
17 rue Dumont d'Urville
City : Caen
Region : BASSIN PARISIEN
BASSE-NORMANDIE
Calvados
FRANCE
PostCode : 14000
T.: +33-2-31357521
Fax : +33-2-31357528
http://www.memodata.com

memodata@wanadoo.fr

 

MEMODATA, founded in 1989; is a SME settled at Caen (Normandy). M. Dominique Dutoit is its director. The activity of the company is Language processing. Language processing has main purposes : make the human language accessible to the computers, make the computers more accessible to human beings. To perform this task, the company is following several main lines.

 

 

Lexicology and terminology

 

Several alphabetic dictionaries have been written by MEMODATA, for electronic publishing purposes (for Goto, Lexibook). Moreover, MEMODATA has a dictionary for translation (5 languages linked through the semantic dictionary of the company). But MEMODATA has also published under its name, DICOLOGIQUETM, a user-friendly semantic dictionary (downloadable on its Web site http://www.memodata.com).

 

Phonetics

 

The access to proper nouns databases (nitcheà niestzche), phonetic spell checking, rhymes (…) are properties of the phonetics units designed and sold by the company (Universalis, Hachette, Xerox, Sligos, Unisys, Thomson, Cap Gemini Telecom…) for French and English.

 

Grammar, conjugation, inflexion, derivation, synonym.

 

For each of these fields, MEMODATA can sell a set of linguistic resources, without royalties such as a database featuring the words with their inflected model (ex : avoir à j'ai, tu as, avions à avoir ou avion). These products are packages in an electronic form (references : De Boeck (Grévisse), Lockace, NTT, ELRA…).

 

Artificial Intelligence and semantic nets.

 

It's the main core of the works of the company since the origin. The "semantic net" is called "The Integral DictionaryTM ". The component of The Integral DictionaryTM allows the semantic interpretation of a text thanks to its millions conditional analogies, its current knowledge and its generation of paraphrases. An example is given by the reverse dictionary, which gives rhabdomancian for an answer as person who predicts the future in looking at the springs. Another example is given in the semantic summary of texts.

These tools are used in the industry and for R&D, under the name of SemiographTM. The Semiograph is a set of API (in Java) which uses the data of The Integral DictionaryTM. One of the main purpose of the Semiograph is to build a new kind of search engine for the Internet or search agents. The main characteristic of this project is to forget the words of the texts and to remember the deep knowledge by assessing the meaning.

The team of MEMODATA has participated in several national or European research projects: Lockace (MENRT, search Engine), STOULS (MENRT, intelligent search agents), CRISTAL (LRE, DGXIII FP3), MARLEN (LEONARDO, help for creative writing), EUROWORDNET (TELEMATICS, LE, DGXIII, FP4), AGIR (MENRT, semantic signature of texts), VIVIAN (ITEA, search agent for PDA), EuroWordNet (DGXIII), IVOMOB (MENRT), BALKANET (IST, FP 5).

 

MEMODATA has developed direct collaborations with private research centers (XEROX Research center, ALCATEL CIT, Thomson, Banque Paribas…). The works of Dominique DUTOIT in the company have also given a University thesis : "Some sense àtext and textàsense calculation using an aprioristic universal semantics."

 

Integrate public knowledge base

It exists number of public knowledge base and this number should increase in the future, as the open source code in the software domain. One important work is to develop an abstract model that can integrate and use these databases.

 

KEY PERSON CV9

Dominique Dutoit (40) has a Ph.D. in the area of computational science and linguistics. Manager of the company MEMODATA since the beginning (1989), he has managed several research programs in accordance to the goal of the company (Natural Language Processing, semantics). In the same area, Dr Dutoit teaches computational linguistics in the University of Caen. Some recent papers published in famous conference (ECAI, ICCSA, CoLing) are some results of the academic work.

 

 

Topics interest

A1) Communication patient - physician

Help to access to common vocabulary

 

A3) communication CAMS-CAMS

Study of the strategies tested by Patimon. Relative efficaciousness of standards (RMI, CORBA, XML, SOAP …) to exchange knowledge

Have a look on multi-agent systems in comparison to the concrete goal of this communication.

 

S1) communication Physician -CAMS

Simplify the access

 

S2) KM & DBS

Provide a strong link between specialized thesaurus such as Medlin and the common language. Integrate these thesauri into a multilingual DBS.

 

D2 – D3 – D4 and (?) M1, M2

 

Recent Publications

[MEMO1] Dutoit D., Poibeau T. : « Inferring knowledge from a large semantic network », Août 2002, full paper, acte de Conference on Computational linguistics, COLING TAIWAN

[MEMO2] Dutoit D., Poibeau T. : « Generating extraction patterns from a large semantic network and an untagged corpora », Août 2002, acte de Workshop, COLING, TAIWAN.

[MEMO3] Dutoit D, Nugues P. : « A lexical network and an algorithm to find words from definitions », acte de European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2002, LYON.

[MEMO4] Dutoit D, Poibeau T. : « Évaluer l’acquisition semi-automatique de classes sémantiques », acte de TALN 2002.

[MEMO5] Dutoit D., Poibeau T. : « Evaluating resource acquisition tools for information extraction », May 2002, full paper, acte de Language resource and evaluation, LREC, Las Palmas

[MEMO6] Dutoit D, Nugues P. : « The right word », May 2002, full paper, acte de Language resource and evaluation, LREC, Las Palmas

[MEMO7] Dutoit D, Nugues P., P. de Torcy: «  The Integral Dictionary : a lexical network based on computational semantics », Springer Ed., May 2003, ICCSA International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications, Calgary, Canada

 

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