Hi everyone,
Frederik Durant is my name, fdurant my Hugging Face handle. I’m originally from Brussels, and Dutch is my mother tongue. Hence the interest.
I’ve been dabbling and later working in (and occasionally out of) NLP since 1990 - yes that’s not a typo. Having been around for so long, I’ve witnessed the evolution from rule-based to statistical to neural approaches in industry first hand. It’s amazing how the field has evolved from a highly specialized academic discipline to an installable library where you can get crazy stuff done in 10 lines of code.
My interested has always been in building applications based on (among other things) NLP, rather than on the core discipline itself. Consider me a friendly integrator.
Professionally, I currently work as a freelance ML engineer on chatbots in the banking sector, but I can’t say much about that for confidentiality reasons.
I’m here to learn first, and also to contribute as soon as I can.
Feel free to contact me via LinkedIn.