Lapia.

I grew up in Chad speaking a language with almost no digital footprint. Today I build the technology that gives languages like mine one. My research at CRIL-CNRS (UMR 8188) connects two worlds that rarely meet: discourse-level NLP and formal methods, probing how texts echo one another and how causal structure can be extracted from narratives, with formal guarantees rather than heuristics.

A second thread runs alongside it: multilingual evaluation. Having built speech and translation systems for African languages, I keep meeting the same problem, which is that the automatic metrics say very little about whether a model understood anything. That question is what most of my current benchmark work is about.

I teach algorithmics at Université d'Artois. On YouTube, Sakayo Tech brings AI education in French to students across francophone Africa, and my mentorship program supports a first cohort of 20 young innovators in Chad. I've worked with UNICEF, EPFL, CDIAL, and Batazia, and I contribute to the Masakhane and AfricaNLP communities as a researcher and reviewer.