Claire Gardent

I am a senior research scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), based at the LORIA Computer Science research unit in Nancy, France.

My research lies in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), with contributions spanning syntactic, semantic, and discourse parsing, question answering, human-machine dialogue, and computer-assisted language learning. In recent years, my focus has shifted primarily toward neural approaches to Natural Language Generation (NLG). In 2017, I initiated the WebNLG Challenge, a shared task aimed at generating natural language from Knowledge Graphs. Since then, I have developed neural models for various NLG tasks, including text simplification and summarization, long-form and multi-document question answering, multilingual generation from Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs) and from Knowledge Graphs, and response generation for dialogue systems. I currently lead the AI ENACT Chair, which focuses on developing faithful and trustworthy NLG systems.

I was nominated Chair of the European Chapter for the Association of Computational Linguistics (EACL), editor in chief of the journals "Traitement Automatique des Langues" and "Language and Linguistic Compass (Computational and Mathematical Section)" and member of the editorial board of the journals "Computational Linguistics", "Journal of Semantics", "Journal of Linguistic Modelling". I acted as program chair for various international conferences, workshops and summer schools (EACL, ENLG, SemDIAL, SIGDIAL, ESSLLI, *SEM) ans as chair of SIGGEN, the ACL Special Interest Group in Natural Language Generation. In 2022, I was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal and was selected by the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) as ACL Fellow. In 2024, I served as general chair for the ACL conference.