What caught the attention of the jury of Namurians for the Year 2022 was Anthony Cleve's contribution to the contextual dictionary project "Langue des signes francophone de Belgique (LSFB) - Français", designed by a team of researchers in linguistics and computer science at UNamur. This is a world first, offering a high-performance tool that can be searched in both languages, is easy to use and accessible free of charge to a wide audience: deaf children, their families, teachers, translators and interpreters. This result is a technical and scientific achievement, thanks to the excellent collaboration and the important complementarity that has been established between the linguists of the NaLTT Institute and the computer science researchers of the NADI Institute.

So today, Anthony Cleve is being rewarded for his boldness in agreeing to embark on this project eight years ago. "At the end of 2015, when Laurence Meurant (Namurian of the Year 2012 and Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in Linguistics of the LSFB, NDLR), proposed to me a collaboration between linguistics and computer science, for an applied research project at the service of a noble cause, I accepted immediately! I dared to take up the challenge of multidisciplinarity, which is not always easy for a researcher because it pushes us out of our disciplinary comfort zone," confides Anthony Cleve.

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As an expert in data modelling, Anthony Cleve will not only concentrate his research work on the development of this dictionary, but he will also motivate several of his colleagues from the Faculty of Computer Science to take part in the project: professors Benoit Frenay, a specialist in machine learning, and Bruno Dumas, an expert in the human-machine interface, as well as a number of dissertation and doctoral students.

I am very touched by this title of Namurian, because it gives meaning and recognition to this important research work, carried out by a whole team. This project has not only been a great opportunity for the development of my work, but also, and this is one of my great prides, it is a source of inspiration for our computer science students: many students have told me that they want to work on this subject.  This project has raised awareness of the societal impact of computer science research

On the picture: Laurence Meurant (LSFB-Lab), Anthony Cleve (Computer Science), Benoît Frénay (Computer Science), Bruno Dumas (Computer Science), Sibylle Fonzé (LSFB-Lab), Bruno Sonnemans (LSFB-Lab), Alice Heylens (LSFB-Lab), Maxime Gobert (Computer Science), Jérome Fink (Computer Science), Maxime André (Computer Science), Pierre Poitier (Computer Science), Loup Meurice (Computer Science).