My time at RGCL — Jeremy Chelala

My name is Jeremy Chelala, a Belgian student from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, and in the context of my Master course in NLP, I worked as a trainee at RGCL. Thanks to the Erasmus+ programme, I had the chance to work with the RGCL staff members for nine weeks in the summer of 2017. My fields of interest for this internship were automatic simplification and summarization, with a particular focus on the way we can combine techniques from both fields to improve automatic summary generation. During my time at RGCL, I implemented a sentence compressor, working together with simplification and summarization specialists as R. Evans and Dr. C. Orasan, who was my supervisor at RGCL. This compression tool represents a substantial first step in the elaboration of a larger summarization system, which I will present in my Master thesis in 2018.

During my traineeship, I could take advantage of several NLP researchers’ experience and advice to help me develop my program, not to mention technical and logistical support. I was taught to use new tools and techniques to solve specific NLP problems. Furthermore, by being part of the Group, I could participate to several seminars given by experienced researchers, learn about their latest advances and see how a research centre operates in general. I also met a lot of people from all around the world, whom I hope to see again one day.

The evaluation process of my program is still in progress, but I can already tell that my time at RGCL has been beneficial for my project, as I learned a lot from this experience. If results are promising, a paper presenting my compressor might be published.

Jeremy Chelala