معرفی
Lyne DA SYLVA is Full Professor and Head of the School of Library and Information Sciences (École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information) within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Université de Montréal. She also leads several large-scale interdisciplinary research projects funded by SSHRC and FRQSC, sits on the governing bodies of the Observatory of Sense-Text Linguistics (OLST) and the Interuniversity Research Centre on Digital Humanities (CRIHN), and supervises graduate students in information science.
Education
- B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics, Université d’Ottawa (1987)
- Certificate in Linguistics, Université de Genève (1991)
- M.A. in Linguistics, Université de Montréal (1990)
- Ph.D. in Linguistics, Université de Montréal (1999)
Research Focus
Da Sylva’s work lies at the intersection of computational linguistics and information science. She employs symbolic, rule-based models to develop tools for automatic indexing, summarisation, and semantic enrichment of digital documents. A second stream examines digital libraries as complex sociotechnical systems, investigating how language technologies can improve discovery and use of multilingual scholarly content. Thirdly, she explores documentary semiotics, analysing the sign systems that underlie information architectures in libraries, archives and museums.
Recent projects centre on:
- automatic back-of-the-book indexing for digital monographs;
- research-data management ecosystems in Canadian universities;
- semiotic aspects of entities and identity in semantic-web datasets;
- algorithmic law and the migration of legal norms into technical devices.
Funding & Partnerships
Since 2005 she has been principal investigator or co-investigator on more than CAD 5 million in grants from SSHRC, FRQSC and NSERC. She currently co-leads the strategic partnership “Autonomisation des acteurs judiciaires par la cyberjustice” (2018-2026) and heads the FRQSC team grant “Le lexique entre humains et machines” (2025-2030).
Scientific Awards & Distinctions
While no named awards are explicitly listed, her continuous success in highly competitive tri-council funding programmes and her invitations to keynote or guest-edit leading journals (Document numérique, Documentation et bibliothèques) attest to national and international recognition.
Supervision & Teaching
At the master’s and doctoral levels she teaches courses on research-data management, indexing methodology, thesaurus construction, digital libraries and NLP tools for information professionals. She has supervised or co-supervised four recent theses covering legal recognition of smart contracts, archival vocabulary for thematic access, linked-data initiatives at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and terminological variation in thesauri.
Laboratories & Teams
Her research is anchored in the OLST (Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte) and the CRIHN (Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques), both of which provide computational infrastructure and interdisciplinary collaboration networks for projects in language technology, digital humanities and data curation.
