Virtual communities on the Internet

    The information society can be characterized by a marked change in businesses and markets: the transformation of business models is due to the emergence of the Internet, in general, and most notably, to the the new players that are the "virtual communities". The most clearcut cases concern the music industry with its peer-to-peer exchanges (Napster, Kazaa, etc.) that allow web users to share music files on the Internet, the software industry with the development of freeware, the media industry with communities of web users sharing their
opinions on a range of issues, or games communities or meeting rooms in which virtually incarnated people socialize and swap or sell digital goods and services.
    Nicolas Auray, David Bounie, Michel Gensollen and Marc Bourreau are studying the ways these virtual communities alter market and business practices by organizing demand on the basis of a liberal and free exchange of information and knowledge. They are endeavouring to develop a common body of knowledge and terminology and to define the virtual public spheres in which people voice their opinions.

Modeling spontaneous language

    In order to predict new user practices and offer new services, it is essential to better Research at ENST understanding human communication. When they recount something, individuals calculate the value of what they say in terms of probability and impact. When people develop an argument, they test out and restore a logical coherence between their beliefs and their desires. The purpose of the work of Jean-Louis Dessalles is to simulate such procedures and create a model for them.
    Another fundamental problem consists in understanding how egoistic agents can manage to communicate honestly. Multi-agent simulations reveal that honest communication is stable when it is used to display informational dimension of the individuals concerned.

Automatic processing of natural languages

    The Internet explosion has led to a considerable increase in the sources and volumes of textual information available online, underlining the need for automatic processing tools to handle this information.
    Research conducted by François Yvon in this area aims to improve the tools currently available, especially through the use of automatic learning technologies data-based: morphosyntactic labeling, semantic analysis. Such technologies ultimately contribute to the final user applications: voice applications, information search and extraction, automatic translation, etc.

Towards a semantic web

    The Web of the 21st century will be "semantic" and socially structured or it will be drowned in noise. Today, the only effective web search seems to be based solely on linguistic engineering, as was the case when people were just starting to look for information in major text corpuses. However, entrusting one’s production/publication of resources for the Web to such search engines alone is tantamount to giving up, if the additional effort is not made to annotate these resources by using controlled or indexed terms in widely accepted information
structures (thesauri, meta databases and other ontologies). Such efforts will be generously rewarded by the capabilites of new semantic search engines relying on knowledge engineering and by developing networks of recognition and trust between peers.
    Research into such networks has been undertaken by Jean-Marc Saglio in partnership with France Telecom R&D.