Jean-Luc Meunier


2026

In this paper, we describe NAVER LABS Europe’s submission to the instruction-following speech processing short track at IWSLT 2026. We participate again in the constrained setting, developing systems capable of jointly performing ASR, ST, and SQA from English speech into Chinese, Italian, and German. Building on our previous submission, ranked first in last year’s short track, we update our multi-stage training pipeline by replacing the speech projector with SpeechMapper, a method for learning a speech-to-LLM embedding projector using ASR-only data. In addition, we introduce a synthetic SQA dataset, fakACL, composed of artificially generated scientific presentations. This dataset is built by prompting the LLM backbone, segmenting the generated talks, and synthesizing speech with Seamless. The combination of an improved speech projection mechanism and domain-specific synthetic data allows our model to outperform last year’s best short-track system, while being considerably more compact and relying on a weaker LLM backbone.

2020

We present Vital Records, a demonstrator based on deep-learning approaches to handwritten-text recognition, table processing and information extraction, which enables data from century-old documents to be parsed and analysed, making it possible to explore death records in space and time. This demonstrator provides a user interface for browsing and visualising data extracted from 80,000 handwritten pages of tabular data.

2019

We share a French-English parallel corpus of Foursquare restaurant reviews, and define a new task to encourage research on Neural Machine Translation robustness and domain adaptation, in a real-world scenario where better-quality MT would be greatly beneficial. We discuss the challenges of such user-generated content, and train good baseline models that build upon the latest techniques for MT robustness. We also perform an extensive evaluation (automatic and human) that shows significant improvements over existing online systems. Finally, we propose task-specific metrics based on sentiment analysis or translation accuracy of domain-specific polysemous words.

2015