5 December 2025

2:20 PM – 3:05 PM

Salle Proudhon

Iana Atanassova

Iana Atanassova is a professor of Automatic Language Processing at Marie and Louis Pasteur University, where she heads the Center for Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Research (CRIT). A member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) since 2021, she specializes in information extraction and semantic annotation of texts using linguistic methods, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. She is the leader of several national and European interdisciplinary projects, including the ANR InSciM project on modeling uncertainty in scientific texts.

How does scientific uncertainty reveal the limits of knowledge?

In the face of the profound transformations taking place in our society, the perception of uncertainty in scientific discourse is a major challenge for all research activities. The production of new knowledge relies on rigorous methodological approaches that necessarily involve a degree of incompleteness or error, and thus requires the conceptualization and formulation of the limits of knowledge or uncertainty. We propose to explore how researchers express uncertainty in their publications in order to better understand how scientific discourse constructs and negotiates its own boundaries. By using natural language processing methods, it is possible to analyze scientific corpora to identify linguistic markers of uncertainty, map uncertainties in different disciplines, and compare them with each other. The results presented are based on the advances of the ANR InSciM project (2021-2025), showing how uncertainty can enrich our understanding of epistemic dynamics and open an interdisciplinary dialogue on the limits of knowledge.