R e s e a r c h

Research Interests:

Fabrice Maurel is interested in (1) Morpho-dispositional Semantics, (2) Web Accessibility and (3) Enactive Design of Interactive Systems. In (1), his main studies focus on taking into account layout and typography information for the improvement of natural language processing (Text To Speech Systems, extractive summarization and visualization of documents, Web Page clustering). In (2), he works on multimodal access to web pages by the blind without loss of contents and cognitive efficiency. In (3) he develops haptic and concurrent speech interfaces to encourage the emergence of high-level non-visual reading strategies.

Funded projects:

• 2025::2028 | Academic partner of the 2E2MR project (Text and Image Relation for Exploring and Expertising Climbing Elite Performers) - Funded by ANR
• 2023::2025 | Academic leader of the ABC project (Text Image and Magnetic Reasonance Imaging Analysis to Understand Well-being at the Museum) - Funded by the Public Interest Group in charge of the city of "Caen Millénaire 2025 | Art et Science" initiative
• 2022::2025 | Academic leader of the INDYX project (identification of relevant blocks within a web page, with the aim of integrating this technology to determine the relevance of evaluating and indexing dynamic content areas) - Funded by BPI France 2030 for Development of industrial and service companies in growth markets.
• 2018::2021 | Academic Chief leader of the TAG-THUNDER project(Access to Web Documents by Spatialized Oral Feedback) - Funded by BPI France (PIA2)
• 2017 | Chief Leader of the Tagthunder2 project(Study, Development, Implementation and Evaluation of Innovative Oral Concepts of Non-Visual Access to Texts) - Regional funding (CPER NUMNIE)
• 2016 | Chief Leader of the Tagthunder1 project(Study, Development, Implementation and Evaluation of Innovative Oral Concepts of Non-Visual Access to Texts) - Regional funding (CPER NUMNIE)
• 2013::2016 | Chief leader of the ART-ADN project (Access to Digital Documents by Oral and Haptic Feedback) - Funded by ANR (12-SOIN-0003-2)
• 2015 | Member of the SEMCOMP project (Semantic Resources to Access Web Documents for E-Learning) - Regional funding (CPER)

Implications in the scientific community

• 2025::On-going | Head of the Multimodality and Multisensoriality Working Group within the CNRS Human-Computer Interaction Research Network (GDR IHM).
• 2022::On-going | Member of the editorial board of the journal TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues).
• 2021::On-going | Elected member of the board of the French Association of Automatic Language Processing (ATALA) as scientific ambassador (collaborations with other learned societies and CNRS research groups, PhD Thesis Award, monitoring of the LANGU:IA project, Young Talents Day).
• 2019::On-going | GREYC Representative of the National Research Group on Natural Language Processing (GDR TAL)
• 2018::On-going | Involvement in three Human Computer Interaction Working Groups (participation in national meetings, presentation of work and structuring of actions) | Sound Interfaces ; Human Document Interaction ; HCI and Health
• 2018::2020 | Participation in the construction meetings of the pre-GDR TAL (GDR since 2020). Interventions mainly around the Multimodality axis
• 2017::2023 | Groupe NU (New Uses): multidisciplinary reflection (computer science - GREYC, LITIS; linguistics - LiDiFra; cognitive sciences - PALM) and organisation of seminars on the instrumentation of interpretative activity.

Organisation of Events:

• 2023::On-going | Organization of the National PhD Thesis Award in NLP for ATALA (call for submissions, selection jury, award ceremony).
• 2020::On-going | In charge of the "aTALiers" in order to improve the visibility of the research activity around Automatic Language Processing produced in the GREYC laboratory (organization of annual local and national seminars).
• 2015 | TALN, the 22nd French Conference on Natural Language Processing - In charge of sponsorship
• 2015 | organization of the ITI (Interface Tal Ihm) workshop during TALN, the 22nd French Conference on Natural Language Processing

Creation of Multidisciplinary Experimental Platforms at GREYC Lab

• 2025::On-going | Sructuring and development of the Smart Home project for the GREYC laboratory | Created as part of the NORMANTHIIA project, the design and setup of the 50m² room draw on expertise in computer science, electronics, and robotics to support the development of innovative teaching and internship projects. The space will include features such as oxygen sensors, floor lighting, a control room with a monitoring system, home automation equipment, a portable MRI, a contact mat for fall detection, screens, speakers, projectors, a dedicated storage area, etc.
• 2024::On-going | Sructuring and development of the psychosensory room project for the GREYC laboratory

  
  

Software and Hardware Developments

• 2025::On-going | TagThunder 2 - experimental platform designed to evaluate "TagThunder" concept, a novel approach enabling visually impaired users to implement non-visual skimming and scanning strategies for more efficient web navigation |
  2025 | Merzougui D. E., Tete, N. Maurel, F.; Dias, G. Concurrent Speech and Auditory Tag Clouds for Non-Visual Web Interaction. Interspeech 2025, submitted.
• 2016::2024 | TagThunder - Access to Digital Documents by Sound Feedback |
  2019 | Maurel F., Dias G, Ferrari S., Giguet E., Jeyafreeda. Andrew J. Concurrent Speech Synthesis to Improve Document First Glance for the Blind. In the 2nd International Workshop on Human-Document Interaction (HDI 2019) associated to the 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2019), Sydney, Australia, 2019.
• 2013::2021 | TactiNet - Access to Digital Documents by Haptic Feedback
  2020 | Maurel, F.; Dias, G.; Safi, W.; Routoure, J.-M.; Beust, P. Layout Transposition for Non-Visual Navigation of Web Pages by Tactile Feedback on Mobile Devices. Micromachines 2020, 11, 376.

Selected Talks:

• 2020 | Touch the web to hear it better... listen to it to touch it better. | 2nd day of the Working Group "intermodality, multimodality" of the National NLP Research Group | Marseille (France)
• 2019 | Touch the web to hear it better... listen to it to touch it better. | Rencontres Universitaires Numériques Normandes (RUNN 2019) "Accessibility and inclusion: digital technology at the service of all! | Caen (France)
• 2016 | Guest speaker | 8th Caen General Assembly on Disability | Caen (France)
• 2016 | TactiNET and Tagthunder Demo | Science Fair | Caen (France)
• 2016 | Short technical, cultural and scientific interventions on disability; trained groups who have the day to design projects, prototypes, or concepts of uses and services to people | Disability and New Technologies Day 2 - TV set - Journalist interview - Creative co-design workshops | Caen Living lab - Le Dôme (France)
• 2015 | Short technical, cultural and scientific interventions on disability; trained groups who have the day to design projects, prototypes, or concepts of uses and services to people | Disability and New Technologies Day 1 - TV set - Journalist interview - Creative co-design workshops | Caen Living lab - Le Dôme (France)

Participation in PhD Jury:

• 2024 | Kirill Milintsevich (Computer Science) | Estimation of Depression Level from Text: Symptom-Based Approach, External Knowledge, Dataset Validity
• 2023 | Nhu Khoa Nguyen (Computer Science) | Détection des tendances émergentes dans les articles de presse
• 2020 | Laetitia Castillan (Psychology) | Accessibility of digital textbooks for students with visual impairment
• 2016 | Cyril Kudlinski (Psychology) | The Mouse, the Stylus and the Child: A Developmental Approach to Child-Computer Interactions
• 2016 | Laurent Sorin (Computer Science) | Contributions of Textual Architectures to Non-visual Accessibility of Digital Records