Étienne Simon

Résumé

Personal Information

Date of birth
Nationality
French
Address
Ullevålsveien 16A
0171 Oslo
Norway
Phone
(+33) 6 35 41 14 14
E-mail
Étienne Simon <esimon@esimon.eu>
Website
http://www.esimon.eu

Research Experience

–
Postdoc: Compositionality of Language Models, Event Extraction for Socio-political Data
University of Oslo (Norway) with Lilja Øvrelid and Erik Velldal.
–
Ph.D.: Deep Learning for Unsupervised Relation Extraction
LIP6, ISIR, Sorbonne University, (Paris, France) supervised by Benjamin Piwowarski and Vincent Guigue.
Machine Translation with Memory Network
Facebook AI Research (Paris, France) with Holger Schwenk
–
Application of Deep Learning to Variable Length Sequences (NMT & geospatial data)
MILA (Montreal, Canada) with Yoshua Bengio
Reasoning on Representations Learnt by Neural Networks
LIP6 (Paris, France) with Patrick Gallinari and Benjamin Piwowarski

Education

Master (M.Sc.) in Mathematics
– Master Mathematic Learning Vision (MVA)
École Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Paris-Saclay, Paris, France
Master (M.Sc.) in Computer Science
– Parisian Master of Research in Computer Science (MPRI)
École Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Cachan (accepted as "Normalien", first place), Paris, France
– Master in Artificial Intelligence and Decision (IAD)
Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University (UPMC), Paris, France
Licence (B.Sc.) in Computer Science
–, (3 terms) Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University (UPMC), Paris, France
(1 term) Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), London, United Kingdom
– (2 terms) Paul Sabatier University (UPS), Toulouse, France
Scientific Baccalauréat (end of high school diploma)
Lycée Ozenne, Toulouse, France

Publications

EACL 2026
Measuring Idiomaticity in Text Embedding Models with 𝜀-compositionality
Sondre Wold*, Étienne Simon*, Erik Velldal, Lilja Øvrelid
ACL findings 2025
Systematic Generalization in Language Models Scales with Information Entropy
Sondre Wold, Lucas Charpentier, Étienne Simon
(KONVENS workshop)CPSS 2025
Abstractive Event Analysis of Armed Conflicts: Introducing the UCDP-AEC Dataset
Étienne Simon*, Helene Bøsei Olsen*, Ramón Carreño, Rahul Mishra, Nikolay Arefyev, Mert Can Yilmaz, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal
ACL findings 2024
Compositional Generalization with Grounded Language Models
Sondre Wold, Étienne Simon, Lucas Charpentier, Egor Kostylev, Erik Velldal, Lilja Øvrelid
(EMNLP workshop)FutureED 2024
Generative Approaches to Event Extraction: Survey and Outlook
Étienne Simon*, Helene Olsen*, Huiling You, Samia Touileb, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal
(EACL workshop)CASE 2024
Socio-political Events of Conflict and Unrest: A Survey of Available Datasets
Helene Olsen*, Étienne Simon*, Erik Velldal, Lilja Øvrelid
Ph.D. thesis 2022
Deep Learning for Unsupervised Relation Extraction
Étienne Simon
(ACL workshop)CONSTRAINT 2022
Fine-tuning and Sampling Strategies for Multimodal Role Labeling of Entities under Class Imbalance
Syrielle Montariol*, Étienne Simon*, Arij Riabi, Djamé Seddah
ACL 2019
Unsupervised Information Extraction: Regularizing Discriminative Approaches with Relation Distribution Losses
Étienne Simon, Vincent Guigue, Benjamin Piwowarski
2017
Neural Machine Translation with Memory Network Based Attention
Étienne Simon, Holger Schwenk
2016
Theano: A Python Framework for Fast Computation of Mathematical Expressions
Rami Al-Rfou et al. (The Theano Development Team)
ECML/PKDD 2015
Artificial Neural Networks Applied to Taxi Destination Prediction
Alexandre De Brébisson*, Étienne Simon*, Alex Auvolat*, Pascal Vincent, Yoshua Bengio

Teaching & Supervision

–
PhD Supervisor: Sondre Wold ("Compositionality And Generalization in Language Modeling")
–
Master Supervisor: Ramón Carreño Villar ("Temporal Event Extraction in the Domain of Armed Conflicts")
–
Teaching Assistant (moniteur) at Sorbonne University
–
Prep School Examiner (colleur) for Lycée Louis-le-Grand MP* classes

Miscellaneous

–
Author of algorithmic challenges for Isograd (Battle Dev, Meilleur Dev de France, …).
–
Author of secondary-school teacher certification (CAPES) mock exams for the CNED (public institution under the oversight of the French Department of Education).
–
Member of Prologin, the French national computer science contest.
Making algorithmic challenges, member of the jury, secretary of the association
Open-source implementation of Deep Mind's Hermann et al. paper Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend with Alex Auvolat and Thomas Mesnard.
Winner of the Kaggle Competition ECML/PKDD 15: Taxi Trajectory Prediction (I) as part of team 🚕 with Alex Auvolat and Alexandre de Brébisson.
–
Oral examiner ("colleur") in Computer Science at lycée Louis-le-Grand (MP/MP*, equivalent to college sophomore.)
Creation of High School Computer Science courses for the GICS (the Group for Scientific Initiative and Culture.)
Member of the jury of Prix Bernard Novelli, a programming contest for French high school students.
Google Summer of Code on The Battle for Wesnoth.
Implementation in C++ of an action planning/management system.
–
Triple finalist of Prologin, the French national computer science contest.
–
Member of the Computer Science student association Comput'yourself.
–
Co-founding member of BSD France, association promoting the use of BSD systems in France.

Skills

Programming
C++
Lua
Python
Perl
Haskell
(Lua)(La)TeX
…
Library
Torch
Huggingface
Tensorflow
NumPy
Boost
…
Environment
Nix
Vim
…
Languages
French (native)
English (C2)
Japanese (B1)
Norwegian (A2)