Gustave Cortal
I'm a third-year PhD student at Laboratoire Méthodes Formelles (École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, Université Paris-Saclay) under the supervision of Alain Finkel, Patrick Paroubek and Lina Ye since 2022.
My research interests are NLP fundamentals, subjectivity analysis, and the philosophy of mind, language, and technology.
Contact
For research or teaching purposes, please get in touch with me at: gustave.cortal (at) ens-paris-saclay (dot) fr.
Peer-reviewed publications
△ International conference ○ National conference ◇ National journal
△ G. Cortal and A. Finkel. Nov 4-9, 2025. Formalizing Style in Personal Narratives. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025), Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics. 22% acceptance.
△ N. Richet, S. Belharbi, H. Aslam, M. Schadt, M. González-González, G. Cortal, A. L. Koerich, M. Pedersoli, A. Finkel, S. Bacon, E. Granger. Sep 30, 2024. Textualized and Feature-based Models for Compound Multimodal Emotion Recognition in the Wild. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop and Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW), Milan, Italy. European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV). Our models achieved third place in the competition.
△ G. Cortal and C. Bonard. Aug 11-16, 2024. Improving Language Models for Emotion Analysis: Insights from Cognitive Science. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages 264–277, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
○ G. Cortal and C. Bonard. Jul 8-12, 2024. Améliorer les modèles de langue pour l'analyse des émotions : perspectives venant des sciences cognitives. In Actes de la 31ème Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles, volume 1 : articles longs et prises de position, pages 307–322, Toulouse, France. ATALA and AFPC. poster.
△ G. Cortal. May 20-25, 2024. Sequence-to-Sequence Language Models for Character and Emotion Detection in Dream Narratives. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 14717–14728, Torino, Italy. ELRA and ICCL. slides. video. 20% acceptance rate (oral presentation).
△ G. Cortal, A. Finkel, P. Paroubek, L. Ye. Mar 17-22, 2024. Emotion Recognition based on Psychological Components in Guided Narratives for Emotion Regulation. In Proceedings of the 7th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 72–81, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics. slides. video.
◇ G. Cortal. Mar 2024. Automatisation du codage des personnages et de leurs émotions dans les récits de rêves avec des modèles de langue [Sequence-to-Sequence Language Models for Character and Emotion Detection in Dream Narratives]. In Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 65, Numéro 1 : Varia, pages 11–35, France. ATALA.
△ G. Cortal, A. Finkel, P. Paroubek, L. Ye. Sep 6-7, 2022. Natural Language Processing for Cognitive Analysis of Emotions. Semantics, Memory, and Emotion, Paris, France. poster. slides.
Talks
Gustave Cortal. 31 May, 2024. Statistical Language Modeling: from N-grams to Transformers. Tutorial for Formal Methods and Artificial Intelligence working group of Laboratoire Méthodes Formelles (ENS Paris-Saclay). slides. video.
Gustave Cortal. Feb 6, 2024. Natural Language Processing: Perspectives on Emotion Analysis, Seminar of Laboratoire Méthodes Formelles (ENS Paris-Saclay). slides. video.
Gustave Cortal and Constant Bonard. Jan 18, 2024. Large Language Models and Emotional Understanding, Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy group at Institut Jean-Nicod (EHESS, ENS Ulm). slides.
Gustave Cortal. Dec 5, 2022. Automatic identification of emotions and their causes in texts, Doctoral Students Day 2nd edition (DATAIA). slides
Teaching experience
Primary Instructor, Natural Language Processing, École Pour l'Informatique et les Techniques Avancées, 2024 and 2025. Semester-long courses to 150 final-year engineering students for two consecutive years (90h). Developed a complete course with slides, exercises, and exams available on github.
Primary Instructor, Statistical Learning with R, École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, 2023. Semester-long computer science course to 25 Normalien students in economics (31h). Developed a complete course with slides, exercises, and exams available on github.
Teaching Assistant, Algorithms and Complexity, CentraleSupélec, 2022. Semester-long course to 30 engineering students (21h).
Student supervision
Raphaël Faure (M2, CentraleSupélec, MVA). Formalizing Subjective Experience (co-supervised with Alain Finkel). March - Aug 2025.
Nicolas Richet (M2, National School of Computer Science for Industry and Business). Multimodal Emotion Analysis (co-supervised with Eric Granger and Muhammad Haseeb Aslam). March - Jul 2024.
Utkarsh Pant (2nd year Bachelor, Bombay Indian Institute of Technology). Natural Language Processing and Formal Methods (co-supervised with Alain Finkel). May - Jul 2024.
Racha Hachem (M1, Paris-Saclay University). Imageability Prediction in Emotional Narratives (co-supervised with Alain Finkel). May - Sep 2023.
Selected open-source projects
My research models are publicly hosted on Hugging Face and were trained using the Jean Zay supercomputer.
Piaget, a language model for psychological and philosophical reasoning. 2025.
PsychologicalReasoning-15k, open psychological and philosophical reasoning traces. 2025.
Oneirogen, a language model for dream generation. 2024.
Dream‑T5, a language model for emotion and character prediction in dream narratives. 2023.
French language models for emotion component prediction and discrete emotion prediction. 2022.