He got his PhD in Computer Science in 2007 from Henri Poincaré University, Nancy, France. During his PhD, he took part in the design and implementation of the XMG description language and its application to the formal description of French syntax and semantics. In 2007-2008, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at University of Tübingen, Germany, where he worked on symbolic parsing with tree-based grammars. From 2009 to 2017, he was an Associate Professor at Université d'Orléans working on constraint-based approaches in computational linguistics.