Home, contact          

Books

 You will find here some information about the edition of my research works, from my Ph.D. thesis to syntheses and scientific popularizations in related domains.
  Curriculum Vitae          
  Research activities          
  Books          
  Publications          


2020 Landragin, F., Comment parle un robot ? Les machines à langage dans la science-fiction. Editions du Bélial', collection « Parallaxe », Saint-Mammès, 2020, ISBN 978-2-84344-965-9.

Essay on natural language processing and its application in science fiction literature and cinema. The book deals with the questions of speaking artificial intelligence, automatic speech recognition, automatic language comprehension, as well as machine translation, with the recurrent example in science fiction of the universal translator. Such examples raise questions about the difficulties and challenges involved in designing a robot capable of speech. Extracts (in French).

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that", says HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. OK. But how does he tell us? Talking machines are everywhere, in science fiction - from Metropolis to WALL-E to the T-800 from Terminator - or in everyday life, with the androids Pepper or Nao, and the vocal assistants that are Siri or Cortana. In their silicon entrails, what's going on? How can we make ourselves understood? And how do they understand us? What should we think of AI and SF robots capable, like C-3PO, of speaking six million languages and forms of communication? Are the machine that understands everything and the universal automatic translator within reach?
2019 Landragin, F., Lehoucq, R., Robinson, C. & Steyer, J.-S., L'art et la science dans Alien. La Ville Brûle, collection « Infinie », Montreuil, 2019, ISBN 978-2360121175.

Essay on Ridley Scott's film 40 years after its release in France, and more generally on the whole saga. My part concerns intelligent machines, dealing with supercomputers like Mother on the one hand, and androids on the other, all of them being capable of interpreting and producing sentences in human languages.

Art and science are at the heart of the Alien saga, an exceptional and disturbing work that has left its mark on several generations of viewers, and helped to revolutionize science fiction films.
Why is this monster so disturbing? Where can we locate it in the phylogenetic tree of species? Is it the ultimate super-predator?
Are interstellar voyages using cryogenic sleep for tomorrow? Will we ever be able to colonize other planets?
What are the roles and places of androids in our society?
What are the sources of inspiration of the artist H.R. Giger, Alien's designer?
These are the questions that underpinned the preparation of this book, and that structure it into several chapters corresponding to the authors' scientific domains.
2018 Landragin, F., Comment parler à un alien ? Langage et linguistique dans la science-fiction. Editions du Bélial', collection « Parallaxe », Saint-Mammès, 2018, ISBN 978-2-84344-943-7.

Essay on general linguistics and its staging in science fiction literature and cinema. The book deals with the question of the origin of languages, the characteristics of constructed languages, as well as linguistic anticipation. Examples drawn from science fiction make it possible to define the field of "linguistic fiction" and to question the peculiarities of a first contact with extraterrestrials. Extracts (in French).

How to talk to aliens who just land on Earth? How to be understood by them without blundering? How to grasp what they are trying to tell us, without being mistaken and unintentionally provoking an irresistible conflict? Aliens may not speak American English as some movies have accustomed us to. But what can linguists do face to an unknown language? Can the classical methods of explorers apply? What are the benefits of modern methods, online resources like Wikipedia and recent research results on oral and written languages? These questions are the subject of this book dedicated to language in science fiction. We will see to what extent the stories of Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance, Greg Egan or Ted Chiang are scientifically plausible or totally fictional. Moreover, this book will provide you with basic knowledge of linguistics, a science that everyone knows the name without really knowing what is behind it. Does a linguist necessarily speak several languages? What exactly is the nature of the work of a linguist? Is science fiction that deals with first contact realistic?
2017 Poudat, C. & Landragin, F., Explorer un corpus textuel. Méthodes - pratiques - outils. De Boeck Supérieur, collection « Champs linguistiques », Louvain-la-Neuve, 2017, ISBN 978-2-8073-0563-2.

Essay on the methodology of corpus exploration, in collaboration with Céline Poudat (University of Nice, BCL laboratory) and with "Corpus, Languages and Interactions" consortium of Huma-Num, the Very Large Facility which aims to facilitate the digital turn in humanities and social sciences (formerly "IR Corpus"). Extracts (in French).

With the digital turn, the practices of linguists have evolved sensibly. Describing discourses and uses, or highlighting particular linguistic phenomena is more and more taking the form of using digital corpus in order to test hypotheses. This practice involves many processes, for which methodological benchmarks are required. Which method can be chosen considering which research objective? Why annotate a corpus? How its structure or specificities can be revelated? What are the tools that can be used? The originality of this book is to propose, in a practical and situated way, a set of methodological references in connection with the uses and tools that are the most used in the French linguistic research field. This work is based on an institutional context and collective brainstorming carried out within the framework of a working group on corpus exploration. The methods that are presented are illustrated with concrete examples of research and exploitable tools.
2015 Landragin, F., La série photo. Démarche - Cohérence - Impact. Eyrolles, collection « Secrets de photographes », Paris, 2015, ISBN 978-2-212-14257-0.
Translated into Italian by Il Castello Editions, collection « Fotografia », Milan, 2019.

Essay on the realization of coherent sets of photographs (series, serial photography), including an analogy based on notions from discourse linguistics. Extracts (in French).

This book presents the approaches, criteria and some practical examples to become an efficient serial photographer. After a short state of the art on the notion of series in painting and photography, we list the technical criteria that can be taken into account by serial photography. We explore the narrative aspects and the graphical coherence, using a set of notions (referent, rhythm, connectors, cohesion, coherence) studied by linguistics and applied here to the photographic language. The different phases when building series are described step by step, from the early preparation to the editing. Series analysis tables are presented and discussed. The book also proposes a set of retouching techniques adapted to sets of pictures, in order to make them coherent and to increase their impact. Finally, examples of series are presented, using several types of subjects and highlighting the specific approach of each case.
2013 Landragin, F., Man-Machine Dialogue. Design and Challenges. Wiley-ISTE, London, 2013, ISBN 978-1-84821-457-6.
Landragin, F., Dialogue homme-machine. Conception et enjeux. Hermès-Lavoisier, Paris, 2013, ISBN 9-782746-245228.

This is a synthesis that I wrote together with my habilitation to supervise research. Complete text (with the permission of the publisher). Complexe text in French (with the permission of the publisher).

This book summarizes the main problems posed by the design of human-machine dialogue systems and offers ideas on how to continue along the path towards efficient, realistic and fluid communication between humans and machines. A culmination of ten years of research, it is based on the author's development, investigation and experimentation covering a multitude of fields, including artificial intelligence, automated language processing, human-machine interfaces and notably multimodal or multimedia interfaces.
2004 Landragin, F., Dialogue homme-machine multimodal. Modélisation cognitive de la référence aux objets. Hermès-Lavoisier, Paris, 2004, ISBN 2-7462-0992-6.

This is the edited version of my Ph.D. thesis. Available at the publisher's website.
Complete text (in French, with the permission of the publisher).

The way we see the objects around us determines speech and gestures we use to refer to them. The gestures we produce structure our visual perception. The words we use have an influence on the way we see. In this manner, visual perception, language and gesture present multiple interactions between each other. The problem is global and has to be tackled as a whole in order to understand the complexity of reference phenomena and to deduce a formal model. This model may be useful for any kind of human-machine dialogue system that focuses on deep comprehension. We show how a referring act takes place into a subset of objects. This subset is called reference domain and is implicit. It can be deduced from a lot of clues. Among these clues are those which come from the visual context and from the utterance, and those from the user's intention, attention and memory. We propose a formalization of reference domains taking these parameters into account. We focus on the notion of salience for which we propose a formal characterization. In fact, it seems that implicit information can most readily be retrieved from salient clues. We show how a dialogue system can exploit the resulting hypotheses with the help from a relevance criterion. We lay the foundations of the computation of this criterion. Our contribution is then directing along the identification of implicit information in multimodal communication, in terms of objects structures and of cognitive criteria formalizations.