Brigitte Bigi

Homepage

Researcher at CNRS, I work at Laboratoire Parole et Langage in Aix-en-Provence, France.

My research focuses on reproducible methods for speech and multimodal interaction data, spanning applied computational linguistics, corpus science, and time-aligned signal processing. Earlier work includes ASR and NLP.

My approach is methodologically rigorous and implementation-aware: I define protocols for corpus design, annotation conventions, and quality criteria; implement and validate the associated workflows; and ensure results are traceable, auditable, and reusable. I work end-to-end, from corpus constraints to quantitative analyses, prioritizing robustness and explicit methodological choices.

I’m the author of SPPAS, which I use to translate these protocols into validated, reusable workflows.

Over the last years, I have focused on tools and workflows that support annotated datasets: automatic/semi-automatic annotation, management of multi-level annotations, filtering/querying structured layers, and statistical analyses of time-aligned measures. This work requires careful handling of heterogeneous data (recordings, aligned annotations, multimodal streams), systematic verification of inputs/outputs, and documentation that allows other teams to reproduce analyses reliably.

I also contribute to Open Science practices beyond publication: sustainable dissemination of methods and resources, long-term maintenance of research-grade software, and alignment with FAIR principles (clear documentation, standard formats, and reuse-oriented outputs).

More recently, I have developed multimodal corpus methodologies and computational analyses for French Cued Speech (LfPC), combining speech, video and manual/facial cues to study accessible communication in the context of hearing impairment.

Open Science information
Events and organizations about Open Science

Award Ceremony 2022 (audio/video, in French)

Photo remise trophée Science Ouverte
The award ceremony: B. Bigi, and S. Retailleau - MESR Minister

Recent projects and activities

Resume

Past research topics are related to text corpora:

I am a graduate from Avignon University with a PhD in Computer Science. From 1997 to 2000, I worked with Professor Renato De Mori at LIA, France. I worked on statistical language modelling for automatic speech recognition and information retrieval. I had introduced a new effective model for topic identification.

From 2000 to 2002, my work at LORIA focused on topic identification in newspaper articles and e-mails.

From 2002 to 2009, I worked at LIG on statistical language modelling for automatic speech recognition and statistical machine translation.

Since 2009, at LPL (Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France), my research has focused on corpus creation and annotation of speech recordings. My research focuses on language-independent approaches to tools and systems development so that they can be used either for languages with few available data resources or for languages with unexpected amount of – unnecessary – data.

Professional Experiences