Eric Gaussier ERIC GAUSSIER


 Professor (Computer Science) Université Joseph Fourier (Grenoble I)

Deputy Director of the Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble (LIG)

Head of the AMA team, working on Machine Learning and Information Modeling

Co-responsible of the Mathematics and Computer Science Master of University J. Fourier (Grenoble I)


Research interests:  Machine learning, information retrieval, computational linguistics.

My research focuses on probabilistic modeling of large document collections for information access. I am particularly interested in multilingual, multimedia collections, and applications as categorization, clustering and information retrieval.

I am involved in the following projects on these topics:

and was recently involved in the projects:
  • LASCAR (LArge Scale CAtegoRization) (January 2008-December 2009)
  • INFOM@GIC (French project) (2005-2006 pour ma participation)
  • PASCAL European Network of Excellence (2004-2006)
  • REVEAL THIS (European project) (2004-2007)
  • KerMIT (European project) (2001-2004)
  • MuchMore (European project) (199-2002)
  • Outiller les Alliances (French project) (2001-2003)
I have also had the opportunity (and the pleasure) to work with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics on re-ranking PubMed search results.

I recently have co-organized: and am currently organizing the 2011 PASCAL Challenge on Large Scale Cateogrization.

I am a member of the editorial board of Document Numérique, and a past member of the editorial board of Traitement automatique des langues, Computational Linguistics and International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. I was program co-chair of EMNLP 2006, and senior programme committee member of SIGIR 2010. I was part of the programme committees of the following recent events:

  • in 2011: SIGIR, ECIR, CORIA, EGC, CAP, ESWC, ICTIR, WebSocial
  • in 2010: SIGIR, ECIR, CIKM, CORIA, COLING, EMNLP, TALN, ECML, CAP

I am also a member of the Computer Science panel of the European Research Council for Starting Grants, since 2007, a member of the Advisory Board of SIGDAT, and was a member of the Executive Board of the European Association for Computational Linguistics from 2007 to 2010.

PhD students

  • Cédric Lagnier, French national funding MNRT; (2009-)
  • Clément Grimal, co-supervised with G. Bisson, ANR funding; (2009-)
  • Bo Li, ANR funding; (2009-)
  • Stéphane Clinchant, CIFRE XRCE; (2008-)
  • Franck Meyer, Orange Labs; (2007-)
  • Ali Mustafa Qamar, French national funding MNRT; (2007-2010)
  • Leile Kefi, co-supervised with C. Berrut, French national funding MNRT; (2002-2006)
  • François Trouilleux, co-supervised with G. Bes and A. Zaenen, CIFRE XRCE; (1998-2001)

    • Publications:  Click here for a list of publications from 2007. Most of my publications from 1996 to 2006 can be downloaded here. Recent publications (2010) include:
    • J. Savoy, E. Gaussier. Information Retrieval, in Handbook of Natural Language Processing, 2nd Edition. N. Indurkhya and F. Damerau Editors. 2010.
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    • S. Clinchant, E. Gaussier. Modèles de RI fondés sur l'information COnférence en Recherche d'Information et Applications (CORIA), Tunisie, 2010.
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    • S. Clinchant, E. Gaussier. Retrieval Constraints and Word Frequency Distributions: A Log-logistic Model for IR Journal of Information Retrieval, Special Issue on the Theory of Information Retrieval, 2010.
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    • S. Clinchant, E. Gaussier. Information-Based Models for Ad Hoc IR 33rd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference, Geneva, 2010.
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    • T.-T. Pham, P. Mulhem, E. Gaussier. Integration of Spatial Relationship in Visual Language Model for Scene Retrieval 8th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing, Grenoble, 2010.
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    • A. Qamar, E. Gaussier, N. Denos. Batch Document Filtering Using Nearest-Neighbor Algorithms Multilingual Information Access, Vol. 1, Text Retrieval Experiments. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), 2010.
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    • A. M. Qamar, E. Gaussier. Similarity Learning in Nearest Neighbor and RELIEF Algorithm. 9th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA 2010).
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    • A. M. Qamar, E. Gaussier. Similarity Learning in Nearest Neighbor, Positive semi-definitiveness and RELIEF Algorithm. Second International Conference of Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition (SoCPaR 2010).
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    • B. Li, E. Gaussier. Improving Corpus Comparability for Bilingual Lexicon Extraction from Comparable Corpora. 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2010.
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    • E. Gaussier. Book Review: Statistical Language Models for Information Retrieval, by C. Zhai Computational Linguistics, Volume 36, Issue 2 - June 2010.


    The paper entitled Modèles de RI fondés sur l'information received the best paper award at CORIA 2010. The English version, Information-Based Models for Ad Hoc IR, was nominated for the best paper award at SIGIR 2010.


    Teaching:  Algorithms and programming, Machine learning, Information retrieval.

    Current teaching activities: algorithms and ADA programming (L2), algorithms for data processing, machine learning and information retrieval (M1 & M2).

    Some material for M1 ATD here

    Some material for RICM4 on association rules here and on previous exams here

    Some material for RICM5 here

    Sample pdf files here

    Fichier texte compressé proter here


    Short bio 

    I graduated from École Centrale Paris in Applied Mathematics and Université Paris 7 in computer science, in 1990. I then received a PhD grant from the Centre Scientifique d'IBM France to conduct research on probabilistic models for bilingual lexicon extraction from parallel corpora. I received my PhD (in Computer Science, from Université Paris 7) in 1995. After a year spent in the linguistics department of Université Paris 7 as research assistant (Atttaché Temporaire d'Enseignement et de Recherche), I joined the Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE) in 1996, to work on textual indexing for information retrieval. In 1999, I spent 6 months at PARC (at that time Palo Alto Research Center) to develop hierarchical versions of PLSI (Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing). I then led a research team on textual information access, and later became area manager of the group Learning and Content Analysis at XRCE, prior to joining the Université Joseph Fourier and the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble as a professor in September 2006. Contact 

    Laboratoire LIG (Laboratoire d'informatique de Grenoble)
    Université Joseph Fourier
    385, rue de la Bibliothèque
    BP 53, 38041 Grenoble Cedex 9

    Office: B113 (acces plan)
    Phone: 33 (0) 476 51 45 15
    Fax: 33 (0) 476 44 66 75
    Email: Eric.Gaussier@imag.fr