Fred Philippy

About Me

Hi, I'm Fred. I am a PhD candidate at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg focusing on Natural Language Processing (NLP). In parallel, I am currently working as a Data Scientist at Zortify, a startup developing NLP-based Human Experience Management tools. My research is focused on multilingual language models and cross-lingual NLP, with a focus on low-resource languages and parameter-efficient methods.

Publications

LuxEmbedder: A Cross-Lingual Approach to Enhanced Luxembourgish Sentence Embeddings

Fred Philippy, Siwen Guo, Jacques Klein, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé 2024. In Accepted at COLING 2025, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Forget NLI, Use a Dictionary: Zero-Shot Topic Classification for Low-Resource Languages with Application to Luxembourgish

Fred Philippy, Shohreh Haddadan, Siwen Guo 2024. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 97-104, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.

Soft Prompt Tuning for Cross-Lingual Transfer: When Less is More

Fred Philippy, Siwen Guo, Shohreh Haddadan, Cedric Lothritz, Jacques Klein, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé. 2024. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Modular and Open Multilingual NLP (MOOMIN 2024), pages 7–15, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Towards a Common Understanding of Contributing Factors for Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Language Models: A Review

Fred Philippy, Siwen Guo, and Shohreh Haddadan. 2023. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5877–5891, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Identifying the Correlation Between Language Distance and Cross-Lingual Transfer in a Multilingual Representation Space

Fred Philippy, Siwen Guo, and Shohreh Haddadan. 2023. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP, pages 22–29, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.

• 4th International Conference 'Language in the Human-Machine Era'
  Beyond Words: A Numerical Approach to Prompting Language Models
  September 2024   UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
• European Language Data Space (LDS) Country Workshop
  NLP for Low-Resource Languages
  19th June 2024   Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Luxembourg
• Elements of AI: Closing Conference
  NLP for Low-Resource Languages
  7th June 2024   Digital Learning Hub, Luxembourg
• 3rd Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA SIG on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL 2024), co-located with LREC-COLING 2024
  Forget NLI, Use a Dictionary: Zero-Shot Topic Classification for Low-Resource Languages with Application to Luxembourgish
  May 2024   Turin, Italy
• 1st Workshop on Modular and Open Multilingual NLP (MOOMIN 2024), co-located with EACL 2024
  Soft Prompt Tuning for Cross-Lingual Transfer: When Less is More
  March 2024   St. Julians, Malta
• Foyer Hackathon 2023
  Intelligence Artificielle Générative
  7th November 2023   Leudelange, Luxembourg
• Graduate NLP Course at OntarioTechU / University of Toronto
  Cross-Lingual Transfer
  2nd October 2023   Online
• The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023)
  Towards a Common Understanding of Contributing Factors for Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Language Models: A Review (Poster Presentation)
  July 2023   Toronto, Canada
• 3rd International Conference 'Language in the Human-Machine Era'
  Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Languages
  May 2023   University of Groningen — Campus Fryslân, Leeuwarden, Netherlands
• 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP (SIGTYP 2023), co-located with EACL 2023
  Identifying the Correlation Between Language Distance and Cross-Lingual Transfer in a Multilingual Representation Space
  May 2023   Dubrovnik, Croatia
• 2nd International Conference 'Language in the Human-Machine Era'
  30th June – 1st July 2022   University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Other Publications

Other Activities

• Member of Working Group 1: Computational Linguistics of the Language In The Human-Machine Era (LITHME) COST Action
• Member of Working Group 3: Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Language Technology of the Universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technology (UniDive) COST Action
• Reviewer for
• - EMNLP 2023
• - EMNLP 2023 Industry Track
• - ACL Rolling Review Initiative
• Attendee of the LITHME Training School 2023
  University of Pristina, Kosovo
  5th - 9th June 2023
• Member of the Organizing Committe of the Workshop Towards Ethical and Inclusive Conversational AI: Language Attitudes, Linguistic Diversity, and Language Rights (TEICAI 2024)

Small Projects

Some smaller projects I worked on during my master's.

Constructing A Neural Network by Hand

Building and training a neural network from scratch and visualizing its predictions.

Bootstrap Hypothesis Testing for Quantiles

Hypothesis testing for quantiles using bootstrapping for p-value computation.

DNA sequence classification via an EM algorithm

Implementing the SeqEM algorithm, which allows to identify genetic variations in a genome, by hand.

Web Scraping Bot in Python

Implementation of a web scraping bot to extract real estate listings.

Education

• PhD in Computer Science
  University of Luxembourg
  2023-current
• MSc in Applied Mathematics, Statistics
  University of Strasbourg, France
  2019-2021
• Double Major BSc in Mathematics and Economics
  University of Strasbourg, France
  2016-2019