Frédéric Blain

Assistant Professor in AI

Tilburg University, NL

I am an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University in The Netherlands, affiliated to the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence led by Dr Marie Postma.

Prior to joining Tilburg, I was a Senior Lecturer in NLP and Translation Technology at the University of Wolverhampton, member of and co-head of teaching for the Research Group on Computational Linguistics (RGCL), affiliated to the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing (RIILP) led by Prof Ruslan Mitkov.

Before becoming an academic, I was a research associate in Machine Translation in Prof. Lucia Specia's group at the University of Sheffield. I worked on discriminative training algorithms for Statistical Machine Translation and continuous adaptation from post-editing workflow within the scope of the EU H2020 QT21 project. I then turned to Quality Estimation for Machine Translation, a topic I have been working on since, in close collaboration with Lucia Specia. Together, we successfully secured several research grants (an Amazon Research Award grant, an EAMT grant and Bergamot, an EU H2020 project), leading to many publications and DeepQuest, the first open-source toolkit for quality estimation for neural-based Machine Translation.

I hold a PhD in Computer Science from Le Mans Université (France), which I defended in 2013. As a PhD student, I worked on post-editing, continuous adaptation as well as domain and project adaptations for Machine Translation under the supervision of Holger Schwenk (Facebook) and Jean Senellart (Systran). I pursued my PhD work as a postdoctoral researcher at LIUM, the Computer Science Laboratory of Le Mans Université, by joining the EU FP7 MateCAT project. I also have experience in industry having held a research engineer position at Systran during my PhD.

More details can be found in my CV and list of publications.

Latest updates

Thu 01 December 2022 New position at Tilburg University, NL

Wed 01 July 2020 New position at the University of Wolverhampton!

Fri 22 May 2020 Unsupervised Quality Estimation for Neural Machine Translation

Mon 20 April 2020 Quality In, Quality Out: Learning from Actual Mistakes

Sat 04 April 2020 Multimodal Quality Estimation

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