Knowledge Needs and Information Extraction: Towards an Artificial Consciousness

Acknowledgements

For seventeen years, I have been musing about the cognitive and computational aspects of language processing. My work could never have been done in acceptable conditions without the support of a number of working groups who have put their faith in me, under the auspices of certain institutions: the University of Strasbourg (Dr. François Rousselot) and the Institut National de Recherche en Agronomie (INRA – National Institute of Agronomic Research) (Dr. Marc Barbier and Dr. Isabelle Hue). Several companies in Strasbourg were willing to take me on as a member of their team despite the risks of the innovative projects under consideration: the Agence de Diffusion de l’Information Technologique (Technological Information Dissemination Agency) (Jérôme Thil) and the company Neurosoft (Gérard Guillerm). My international collaborations have also been fruitful and constructive, and I should like to thank Dr. Vladimir Ivanisenko and Sergey Tiys (University of Novosibirsk, Russia) for their trust and their invaluable thinking on gene networks.