The Ministry of Higher Education and Research has awarded its 2025 Open Source Research Software Prize to Qumin, developed by Sacha Beniamine (former EFL PhD student, supervised by Olivier Bonami) and Jules Bouton (current EFL PhD student, also supervised by Olivier Bonami), at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle – UMR 7110, CNRS/Université Paris Cité.
Qumin: Deciphering Grammar Through Algorithms
Qumin (QUantitative Modelling of INflection) is an open-source Python package that automatically models the inflectional morphology of languages — how words conjugate and decline.
The principle: provide the software with tables of inflected forms (e.g., all conjugations of a verb), and Qumin extracts morphological regularities, identifies inflection classes, and reveals the organization of the grammatical system. What used to take weeks of manual analysis now takes minutes.
Universal scope: applicable to any language in the world, from French to Swahili.
Open Science and Democratization
Qumin stands out for its commitment to reproducibility:
- Standardized data formats (Paralex, frictionless)
- Numerous shared datasets immediately exploitable
- Complete pipeline: from data creation to analysis
Impact: initially designed for a PhD thesis, Qumin is now used by Master’s students and linguists without computer science training, in France and abroad.
Why This Award Matters
This distinction confirms that computational linguistics produces research tools of international caliber, and that Open Science depends on free software, shared standards, and an engaged community. A well-deserved recognition for our EFL members.
Links: → MESR Announcement