Biography

I am a PhD student currently working on the neural machine translation of user-generated content (e.g. social media posts).

Nishimwe is a Rwandan name meaning ‘Thanks be to God’. It is pronounced /niːʃiːmŋé/.

Fun fact: There is another Lydia Nishimwe, who is a singer. Though we share quite a few similarities, we are not related. Feel free to check out her YouTube.

Interests
  • Machine Translation
  • Lexical Normalisation
  • Sentence Embeddings
  • Language Models
  • Languages
Education
  • PhD in Computer Science, 2021-present

    Inria Paris, Sorbonne Université

  • MEng in Mathematics and Computer Science, 2017-2021

    École Centrale de Nantes

  • BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science, 2014-2017

    Université Grenoble Alpes

Languages

gb
English

Native

fr
French

Native

es
Spanish

Advanced

ke
Swahili

Intermediate

de
German

Intermediate

rw
Kinyarwanda

Elementary

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
ALMAnaCH Team, Inria
PhD student
Oct 2021 – Present Paris, France

Robust Neural Machine Translation of User-Generated Content

  • 3 first-author publications at major NLP venues (2 conferences, 1 journal)
  • 10+ presentations (conferences, seminars, high school outreach programmes)
  • Model training in a High-Performance Computing environment
  • Peer-reviewing (4 conference papers)

Tech stack: Python, PyTorch (Fairseq, Transformers), SLURM
Organisation: Github/Gitlab, Trello, Zotero
Office pack: LaTex/Beamer, MS Word/PowerPoint/Excel

 
 
 
 
 
Orange Labs
Research Intern
Jun 2020 – Dec 2020 Lannion, France

Inference of masked sequences

  • Literature review on sequence models (seq2seq), and on (non-)autoregressive and (non-)monotonic decoding
  • Experimental study of decoding algorithms on masked sequences of logs from Orange

Tech stack: Python, TensorFlow, Keras
Organisation: Trello, Zotero
Office pack: LaTex/Beamer

 
 
 
 
 
Alpha Manuscript
Co-founder and Software Developer
Sep 2016 – May 2020 Nairobi, Kenya

Collaborative conception and implementation of 3 web applications

  • Web Development (Front-end and Back-end)
  • Project Management and Quality Assurance

Tech stack: TypeScript, Node.js, Vue.js, MongoDB, Bootstrap
Organisation: Github/Gitlab, Slack, Asana

 
 
 
 
 
Mean-In-Full
Software Development Intern
May 2017 – Jul 2017 Meylan, France

Integration of a third-party app (Opencast, a Learning Management System) with the startup’s product (RoCamRoll)

Tech stack: Erlang, HTTP

 
 
 
 
 
Laboratoire TIMA
Assembly Programming Intern
May 2016 – Jun 2016 Grenoble, France

Functional verification of an ARM7 microprocessor

  • Simulation of the microprocessor in VHDL
  • Implementation of new features in C and their test files in ARM

Tech stack: VHDL, C, ARM

🏆Stage d’excellence (Excellence Internship Program) - Université Grenoble Alpes🏆

 
 
 
 
 
Laboratoire VERIMAG
Functional Programming Intern
Jun 2015 – Jun 2015 Grenoble, France

Simulation of GPS tracks

Tech stack: Lutin, Lustre

🏆Stage d’excellence (Excellence Internship Program) - Université Grenoble Alpes🏆

Publications

Making Sentence Embeddings Robust to User-Generated Content
The MRL 2022 Shared Task on Multilingual Clause-level Morphology

Contact