Thomas François

Associate Professor at the UCLouvain
Applied Linguistics, Natural Language Processing

Welcome to my homepage !

I am Thomas François, an Associate Professor at UCLouvain since September 1st, 2022 (previously Assistant Professor from 2018). My research is centered on the study and assessment of language complexity for various kinds of audiences (learners of a foreign language, readers with some language issue, readers of specialty texts, etc.). In addition, I am interested by analyzing efficient communication in professional contexts.

I therefore carried out research in the fields of readability, text simplification, automatic complex word identification, and more recently automated essay scoring, all topics that are at the intersection of applied linguistics and natural language processing.

About

The Center for Automatic Language Processing (CENTAL)

I am currently part of the Center for Automatic Language Processing (CENTAL). The CENTAL is a a technological platform and a research laboratory hosting many researchers specialized in the computer processing of textual data. The lab aims to brings its expertise by devoting time to research, to service to society but also to teaching.

More Info

Research interests

Business communication

Efficient oral and written communication in professional contexts

Psycholinguistics

Reading in a first and second language, reading comprehension testing

Readability

Text readability in L1 and L2

ATS

Automatic text simplification

Data Mining

Classification techniques (linear and logistic regression, KNN, decision trees, boosting, bagging, random forests, SVM...), clustering, deep learning, ...