Contact

• EMail: nicolas.hernandez @univ-nantes.fr
• Github ; LinkedIn
• Publications: Google scholar and HAL
• LS2N 2, Rue de la Houssiniere F-44322 Nantes Cedex 3 - FRANCE ; Phone: +33 (0)2 51 12 53 94
• IUT de Nantes - Departement Informatique 3 rue du Marechal Joffre 44041 Nantes ; Phone: +33 (0)2 40 30 60 67;

Short bio

Nicolas Hernandez is Associate Professor at Nantes University and member of the TALN (NLP) research team at LS2N UMR CNRS 6004 Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Paris-Sud University, completed with a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Caen. His research focuses on natural language processing and text mining, with a particular interest in applications to help humans access and understand textual content in specialized domains (e.g. law, education). He is particularly interested in deep neural architectures and learning techniques for modeling and analyzing discourse structure. He teaches undergraduate courses at the Computer Science department of the Institut Universitaire de Technologie de Nantes (IUT) and master's courses at the Faculté des sciences et des techniques (FST). His responsibilities include co-directing a master's program in machine learning and natural language processing.

More details on my CV (Last update early 2023)

Research activities

• Research areas: Artificial Intelligence (AI); Natural Language Processing (NLP); Text (Data) Mining; Deep Learning; Language modeling; Discourse modeling and analysis; French processing
• ANR Lexhnology Project 2023-2026
• Correspondant SIF pour le GdR TAL
• Publications: Google scholar and HAL

Graduate students

• PhD 2023-... Anas Belfathi
• PhD 2022-... Leane Jourdan
• Master 2025 Hreshvik Sewraj
• Master 2024 Malek Yaich
• Master 2024 Nalin Srun

Teaching activities

• Director with Solen Quiniou of the Computer Science Master program in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing at the Nantes University FST, named ATAL (Apprentissage et Traitement Automatique des Langues)
• LinkedIn Alumni Apprentissage et Traitement Automatique des Langues Nantes Université

News

• Program committee member for ECAI-2025, the 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence to be held in Bologna in October 2025
• Program Committee member for BEA2025, the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications to be held in Vienna, Austria, on July 31-August 1, 2025
• Program committee member EDM2025, Eighteenth International Conference on Educational Data Mining to be held in Palermo, Italy on July 20-23, 2025

Older

• Feb 6, 2025, Séminaire invité "La face cachée de l'IA Génératives, enjeux et défis" à l'Assemblée Générale du campus aéronautique
• Program Committee member for WRAICOGS2025, Workshop on "Writing Aids at the Crossroads of AI, Cognitive Science and NLP" held in Abu Dhabi, UAE on Monday, January 20, 2025 during the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025)
• Accepted Main Conference Long Paper in COLING 2025 "Improving Accessibility of SCOTUS Opinions: A Benchmark Study and a New Dataset for Generic Heading Prediction and Specific Heading Generation" Malek Yaich and Nicolas Hernandez
• Program Committee member for COLING 2025, the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics in 2025 to be held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on January 19-24, 2025
• 2007-2024 Membre du comité de rédaction de la revue électronique Discours
• Participation au montage de l'atelier "Détecter la structure du discours - humains versus AI", collaborations CRINI-LS2N, Fête de la Science, les 12-13 octobre 2024, La Halle 6, Nantes
• Feb 1, 2024 Participation à la table ronde "Ce que l’Intelligence Artificielle change à l’Université" dans le cadre d'une journée d'étude organisée par les Bibliothèques Universitaires de Nantes et la Chaire Unesco RELIA
• 2024 Intership offer, 5 months, master degree or postgraduate degree in engineering, LS2N/Nantes University, Automatic generation of section headings in legal texts
• Nov 27, 2023 Participation à la table ronde “Argument Mining on the Era of Generative AI: Results and Open Challenges” de la Journée Natural Language Argumentation – GDR TAL – GDR RADIA
• Dec 19th 2023, Accepted paper with a special mention in the Best paper awards "Harnessing GPT-3.5-turbo for Rhetorical Role Prediction in Legal Cases" (Belfathi et al., JURIX 2023)
• Oct 1, 2023 Anas Belfathi starts as Ph.D. student
• Sept 7, 2023 Co-organisation d'une journée GdR CNRS TAL sur "Modèles de langue pour les domaines de spécialité"
• Sept 1, 2023 6-month exemption from teaching and administrative duties (CRCT CNU 27)
• June 23rd, 2023 Accepted paper ["Enhacing Pre-trained Language Models with Sentence Position Embeddings for Rhetorecal Roles in Legal Opinions" (Belfathi et al., ASAIL Workshop 2023 held in conjunction with ICAIL 2023)](https://sites.google.com/view/asail/asail-home https://sites.google.com/view/asail/asail-2023-schedule?authuser=0))

• Oct 17, 2023 Co-oganisation de la journée Alumni 10 ans du parcours ATAL (Master INFO)
• Sept, 2023 Création du groupe LinkedIn Alumni Apprentissage et Traitement Automatique des Langues Nantes Université
• 2021-... Co-Responsable du Parcours ATAL (Apprentissage et Traitement Automatique des Langues) au sein du MASTER 2 INFO
• March, 2023 Educational resource 2022-2023 BUT1 INFO - R2.04 "Réseaux et communications bas niveaux
• Nov 29, 2022 Educational resource Open online resources for teaching nlp (interactive python notebooks) ; Used in 2022-2023 M2 INFO - parcours ATAL (Apprentissage et Traitement Automatique de la Langue - X3IT010) and in 2022-2023 M2 Cultures Numériques - DATA 3
• Oct 1, 2022 Leane Jourdan starts as Ph.D. student
• Jul 6, 2022 Project ANR Lexhnology Accepted !!!
• 2019-2022 Responsability: Co-chief editor of the Online Discours Journal
• May 15, 2022 Accepted paper "Exploring the Limits of Lexicon-based Natural Language Processing Techniques for Measuring Engagement and Predicting MOOC’s Certification" (Felix et al., CSEDU 2022)
• May 5, 2022 Accepted paper Open corpora and toolkit for assessing text readability in French (Hernandez et al., READI worskhop @ LREC 2022)
• 2022 Intership offer, 5 months, master degree or postgraduate degree in engineering, LS2N/Nantes University, emotion prediction through emojis as proxy and adaptation to other domains than Twitter
• ...-2022 Educational resource DUT1 INFO - PPN 2013 - M2102 - Architecture des réseaux - [Check some dedicated Open Educational Resources]
• ...-2022 Educational resource DUT2 INFO - PPN 2013 - M4101C - Administration des systèmes et des réseaux - [Check some dedicated Open Educational Resources]
• 2013-2021 Responsability: Internships manager for 2nd and 3rd year at IUT de Nantes - Département Informatique - [Check some dedicated Open Educational Resources]
• 2016-2021 Project ANR PASTEL (Transcription Automatique de la Parole pour l'Apprentissage et la Formation) ; PASTEL web site at LIUM
• 2019 Project CominLab's AILE (Artificial Intelligence for Learning Environments) with several internships
• 2014-2016 Project FUI 17 ODISAE (Optimizing Digital Interaction with a Social and Automated Environment) ; Réaliser un analyseur sémantique de conversations en ligne (par chat, email ou sur un forum) et de l’utiliser pour enrichir un système de gestion de la relation client (mettre à jour automatiquement les FAQ, détecter les experts, évaluer la qualité des réponses, déclencher des actions au fil de l’interaction, analyser les comportements d’utilisation des différents canaux d’interaction et en particulier l’inter-modalité...)

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Misc

• June 30, 2021 Release of PyRATA Python Rule-based feAture sTructure Analysis" in particular for "Text Analysis
• 2017 Release of Dialogue acts recognizer for French computer-mediated communication Communicative function and semantic dimension annotation using the DIT++ label taxonomy
• Nicolas Hernandez, Description et Détection Automatique de Structures de Texte, Université Paris-Sud XI, 14 décembre 2004, PhD Thesis
• Educational resource Guide pratique sur les stages en DUT et Licence Professionnelle Informatique à l’IUT de Nantes (avant, pendant et à la fin)
• Educational resource Gestion de projet (écrire un rapport, consignes de livraison...)
• Educational resource Sondage réalisé auprès des étudiants DUT et Licence Pro de 2015-2016 à l'IUT Nantes à propos de leur expérience sur la recherche et le déroulement de leur stage
• NLP readings selection