personal photo of Elena V. Epure

Elena V. Epure

Tagline:Senior NLP Research Scientist at Deezer

Paris, France

About Me

I am a Senior NLP Research Scientist at Deezer. My current research focuses on creative media, building on my previous experience with social media and news content. My work applies NLP fundamentals to enhance the understanding, personalization, and contextualization of creative media. I also explore topics related to conversational and natural language recommendation and search. Drawing on a multidisciplinary educational background in computer science, digital humanities, and business, along with professional experience in research, software engineering, consultancy, and teaching, I can bring a cross-domain perspective to developing user-centered creative media systems.

Work Experiences

  • Senior NLP Research Scientist

    from: 2018, until: present

    Organization:DeezerLocation:Paris, France

  • Research Consultant, part-time

    from: 2017, until: 2017

    Organization:Panthéon-Sorbonne UniversityLocation:Paris, France

  • Software Engineer

    from: 2014, until: 2014

    Organization:Trimble (former Stabiplan)Location:The Netherlands

  • Software Engineer, part-time

    from: 2011, until: 2013

    Organization:42windmillsLocation:The Netherlands

Education

  • PhD

    from: 2014, until: 2018

    Field of study:Computer ScienceSchool:Panthéon-Sorbonne UniversityLocation:Paris, France

    Description
    • Thesis: "Automatically modeling conversations as processes of interrelated speech intentions"

    • Intersected areas: natural language processing, pragmatics, conversation analysis, text and process mining

    • Side project on user modeling for news recommender systems

  • MSc

    from: 2011, until: 2013

    Field of study:Business InformaticsSchool:Utrecht UniversityLocation:Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Description
    • Thesis: "Intention-mining: a solution to process participant support in process-aware information systems"
  • BSc

    from: 2007, until: 2011

    Field of study:Computer Science and EngineeringSchool:University Politehnica of BucharestLocation:Bucharest, Romania

    Description
    • Thesis: "Evaluating brokers performance in a virtual stock market" (a multi-agent system with integrated reputation model and neural networks for trading)

Supervisions

  • JA

    Joanne Affolter

    Research internship: "Musical versions identification from lyrics representations"

    date: 2025 - 2025

    Degree: Master's Degree .

  • AB

    Abigail Berthe-Pardo

    Research internship: "Persona extraction to support audiobook generation"

    date: 2025 - 2025

    Degree: Master's Degree .

  • MF

    Markus Frohmann

    Research internship: "Synthetic lyrics detection from audio"

    date: 2024 - 2025

    Degree: Master's Degree .

  • YL

    Yanis Labrak

    Research internship: "Synthetic lyrics detection from text"

    date: 2024 - 2024

    Degree: Doctoral Degree .

  • GM

    Gaspard Michel

    PhD thesis: "Automatic book understanding for an enhanced audiobook narration"

    date: 2023 - present

    Degree: Doctoral Degree .

  • ND

    Noé Durandard

    Research internship: "Book natural language understanding"

    date: 2022 - 2022

    Degree: Master's Degree .

  • GA

    Gamar Azuaje

    Research internship: "Multimodal album art generation"

    date: 2021 - 2022

    Degree: Master's Degree .

  • GG

    Giovanni Gabbolini

    Research internship: "Automatic playlist captioning"

    date: 2021 - 2022

    Degree: Doctoral Degree .

  • VM

    Vipul Mishra

    Research internship: "A genre exploration of the emotions of music listeners on Reddit"

    date: 2021 - 2021

    Degree: Master's Degree .

  • FV

    Francisco Valero

    Research internship: "Podcast topic modelling"

    date: 2020 - 2021

    Degree: Master's Degree .

Teachings

  • Introduction to Machine Learning

    From: 2021, Until: 2022

    Organization:Panthéon-Sorbonne UniversityField:Computer Science

    Description:
    • MSc. level course taught in English

    • Roles: Course co-creator, Lecturer, Seminar supervision

  • Process Mining

    From: 2018, Until: 2020

    Organization:Panthéon-Sorbonne UniversityField:Computer Science

    Description:
    • Roles: Lecturer, Seminar supervision
  • Research methods

    From: 2018, Until: 2020

    Organization:Panthéon-Sorbonne UniversityField:Computer Science

    Description:
    • MSc. level course taught in French

    • Roles: Invited Lecturer

  • C Language Introduction

    From: 2015, Until: 2015

    Organization:Panthéon-Sorbonne UniversityField:Computer Science

    Description:
    • BSc. level seminar held in French

    • Roles: Seminar supervision

  • Microsoft .NET Programming

    From: 2009, Until: 2011

    Organization:Microsoft IT Academy UPBField:Computer Science

    Description:
    • Students and industry professionals, taught in Romanian

    • Roles: Course co-creator, Trainer including seminar supervision

Conference Contributions

  • ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys)

    From: 2025

    Women in RecSys co-chair

  • ACL Rolling Review (ARR)

    From: 2022

    To: present

    Reviewer

  • North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies Conference (NAACL-HLT)

    From: 2021

    Reviewer

  • Workshop on NLP for Music and Audio (NLP4MusA)

    From: 2020

    To: 2024

    Co-organiser

  • Workshop on NLP for Music and Audio (NLP4MusA)

    From: 2020

    To: 2024

    Reviewer

  • International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR)

    From: 2020

    To: 2022

    Reviewer

  • Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Conference (EMNLP)

    From: 2020

    2020

  • Workshop on Information Systems Engineering for Smarter Life (ISESL)

    From: 2020

    Reviewer

  • ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys)

    From: 2019

    To: 2020

    Reviewer

  • IEEE International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS)

    From: 2018

    To: 2020

    Posters and demos reviewer

Talks

  • Modeling User Preferences for Music Recommendations with LLMs: Opportunities and Limitations

    Date: Jun 2025

    Event name: Mixtapes Laboratory, CNRS .Location: Paris, France .

  • Modeling User Preferences for Music Recommendations with LLMs: Opportunities and Limitations

    Date: May 2025

    Event name: Loria Laboratory, CNRS .Location: Nancy, France .

  • Modeling User Preferences for Music Recommendations with LLMs: Opportunities and Limitations

    Date: Feb 2025

    Event name: MédiaLab, SciencesPo .Location: Paris, France .

  • NLP Meets Creative Media: Research Applications, Challenges and Opportunities

    Date: Oct 2024

    Event name: Idiap Research Institute .Location: Martigny, Switzerland .

  • Leveraging Book NLU for Enhanced AI Narration

    Date: Oct 2024

    Event name: EPFL .Location: Lausanne, France .

Honors & Awards

  • Outstanding Paper Award

    date: 2023-05-03

    Issuer:European Chapter of the ACL (EACL)

    Description:

    For the article “A Human Subject Study of Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Conversational Music Recommendation Queries”

  • Short-listed for Best Reviewer Award

    date: 2019-09-17

    Issuer:ACM Recommender Systems Conference (RecSys)

  • Prix de thèse

    date: 2019-06-13

    Issuer:Association INFORSID (INFormatique des ORganisations et Systèmes d’Information et de Décision)

  • Prix de thèse

    date: 2019-04-12

    Issuer:Commission de la recherche de l'Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

    Description:

    PhD prize for high academic and scientific work

  • ACM womENcourage Attendance Scholarship

    date: 2016-09-12

    Issuer:Google

  • Doctoral research grant

    date: 2014-10-01

    Issuer:Panthéon-Sorbonne University

  • Merit Scholarship for Outstanding Academic Performance

    date: 2013-10-01

    Issuer:University Politehnica of Bucharest

Publications

  • Double Entendre: Robust Audio-Based AI-Generated Lyrics Detection via Multi-View Fusion

    Conference PaperPublisher:Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025Date:2025
    Authors:
    Markus FrohmannGabriel Meseguer-BrocalMarkus SchedlElena V. Epure
    Description:
    The rapid advancement of AI-based music generation tools is revolutionizing the music industry but also posing challenges to artists, copyright holders, and providers alike. This necessitates reliable methods for detecting such AI-generated content. However, existing detectors, relying on either audio or lyrics, face key practical limitations: audio-based detectors fail to generalize to new or unseen generators and are vulnerable to audio perturbations; lyrics-based methods require cleanly formatted and accurate lyrics, unavailable in practice. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel, practically grounded approach: a multimodal, modular late-fusion pipeline that combines automatically transcribed sung lyrics and speech features capturing lyrics related information within the audio. By relying on lyrical aspects directly from audio, our method enhances robustness, mitigates susceptibility to low-level artifacts, and enables practical applicability. Experiments show that our method, DE-detect, outperforms existing lyrics-based detectors while also being more robust to audio perturbations. Thus, it offers an effective, robust solution for detecting AI-generated music in real-world scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/deezer/robust-AI-lyrics-detection.
  • Just Ask for Music (JAM): Multimodal and Personalized Natural Language Music Recommendation

    Conference PaperPublisher:Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Recommender SystemsDate:2025
    Authors:
    Alessandro B. MelchiorreMarkus Schedl
  • Evaluating LLMs for Quotation Attribution in Literary Texts: A Case Study of LLaMa3

    Conference PaperPublisher:Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)Date:2025
    Authors:
    Gaspard MichelElena V. EpureRomain HennequinChristophe Cerisara
    Description:
    Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in a variety of literary tasks, often using complex memorized details of narration and fictional characters. In this work, we evaluate the ability of Llama-3 at attributing utterances of direct-speech to their speaker in novels. The LLM shows impressive results on a corpus of 28 novels, surpassing published results with ChatGPT and encoder-based baselines by a large margin. We then validate these results by assessing the impact of book memorization and annotation contamination.We found that these types of memorization do not explain the large performance gain, making Llama-3 the new state-of-the-art for quotation attribution in English literature. We release publicly our code and data.
  • Biases in LLM-Generated Musical Taste Profiles for Recommendation

    Conference PaperPublisher:Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Recommender SystemsDate:2025
    Authors:
    Harin Lee Bruno SguerraManuel Moussallam
  • Synthetic Lyrics Detection Across Languages and Genres

    Conference PaperPublisher:Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Trustworthy NLP (TrustNLP 2025)Date:2025
    Authors:
    Yanis LabrakMarkus FrohmannGabriel Meseguer-BrocalElena V Epure