Anne Abeillé (born 13 September 1962 in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

) is a French

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

specialising in

French grammar French grammar is the set of rules by which the French language creates statements, questions and commands. In many respects, it is quite similar to that of the other Romance languages. French is a moderately inflected language. Nouns and most ...

and syntactic theory, in particular

constraint-based grammar Model-theoretic grammars, also known as constraint-based grammars, contrast with generative grammars in the way they define sets of sentences: they state constraints on syntactic structure rather than providing operations for generating syntactic ...

, as well as

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

. She led the creation of the French Treebank, the first syntactically-annotated corpus of French.

Biography

From 1983 to 1987, Abeillé studied at the

École normale supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * Éco ...

, where she graduated in modern literature. She subsequently worked with Aravind Joshi as a research assistant at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

, where she contributed to the development of Lexicalized

Tree-Adjoining Grammar Tree-adjoining grammar (TAG) is a grammar formalism defined by Aravind Joshi. Tree-adjoining grammars are somewhat similar to context-free grammars, but the elementary unit of rewriting is the tree rather than the symbol. Whereas context-free gr ...

(LTAG). In 1991 she received her PhD supervised by

Maurice Gross Maurice Gross (born 21 July 1934 in Sedan, Ardennes; died 8 December 2001 in Paris) was a French linguistJean-Claude Chevalier,, ''Le Monde'', 12 décembre 2001. and scholar of Romance languages. Beginning in the late 1960s he developed Lexicon-G ...

as well as her

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...

at University of Paris 7. She then taught at

Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis Paris 8 University (), or usually the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis or Paris 8, is a public university in the Greater Paris, France. Once part of the historic University of Paris, it is now an autonomous public institution. It is base ...

and

Paris Diderot University Paris Diderot University, also known as Paris 7 (), was a French university located in Paris, France. It was one of the inheritors of the historic University of Paris, which was split into 13 universities in 1970. Paris Diderot merged with Pari ...

before becoming full professor at the latter in 2000, as well as member of the Formal Linguistics Laboratory of the

French National Centre for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 engi ...

, which she has headed since 2011.

Honours and awards

Abeillé is an honorary member of the

Institut Universitaire de France The Institut Universitaire de France (IUF, Academic Institute of France), is a service of the French Ministry of Higher Education that annually distinguishes a small number of university professors for their research excellence, as evidenced by t ...

, where she was a junior member from 1996 to 2001 and then a senior member from 2012 to 2017. She was awarded a bronze and a silver medal by the

in 1995 and 2007 respectively. In 2008 she was elected as an ordinary member of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...

. 2008 also saw her knighted as a member of the

Legion of Honour The National Order of the Legion of Honour ( ), formerly the Imperial Order of the Legion of Honour (), is the highest and most prestigious French national order of merit, both military and Civil society, civil. Currently consisting of five cl ...

, of which she became an officer in 2015.

Selected publications

* Schabes, Yves, Anne Abeillé and Aravind K Joshi. 1988. ''Parsing Strategies With 'Lexicalized' Grammars: Application to Tree Adjoining Grammars.'' CIS Technical Reports, University of Pennsylvania. * Abeillé, Anne. 1993. ''Les nouvelles syntaxes : grammaires d'unification et analyse du français'' (New syntaxes: constraint-based grammars and the analysis of French). Coll. Linguistique, Armand Colin, Paris. * Rastier, François, Marc Cavazza and Anne Abeillé. 1994. ''Sémantique pour l'analyse: de la linguistique à l'informatique'' (Semantics for descriptions: from linguistics to computer science). Masson: Sciences cognitives. . English translation published with CSLI Publications in 2002, * Abeillé, Anne, and Owen Rambow (eds.). 2000. ''Tree Adjoining Grammars: Formalism, linguistic analysis and processing''. Stanford: CSLI Publications. * Abeillé, Anne. 2002. ''Une grammaire électronique du français'' (An electronic grammar of French). Coll. Sciences du langage, Paris: CNRS Editions. * Abeillé, Anne (ed.). 2003. ''Treebanks: building and using parsed corpora''. Dordrecht: Springer. * Abeillé, Anne, Lionel Clément and François Toussenel. 2003. Building a treebank of French. In Abeillé (ed.), 165–187. * Abeillé, Anne. 2007. ''Les grammaires d’unification'' (Constraint-based grammars). London: Hermes. * Abeillé, Anne, and Olivier Bonami (eds.). 2020. ''Constraint-Based Syntax and Semantics: Papers in Honor of Danièle Godard''. Stanford: CSLI Publications. * Abeillé, Anne, and Danièle Godard. 2021. ''La Grande Grammaire du français'' (Comprehensive French Grammar). Actes Sud, Editions de l’Imprimerie Nationale.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Abeille, Anne French women linguists Living people Research directors of the French National Centre for Scientific Research Linguists of French Grammarians from France Syntacticians Computational linguistics researchers 1962 births ENS Fontenay-Saint-Cloud-Lyon alumni