Benoît Sagot, a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique, received his doctorate in computer science from the Université Paris-Diderot in 2006. He then joined Inria as a researcher specializing in automatic language processing (ALP), in what is now the Inria Paris center. He headed the ALPAGE team there from 2014 to 2016, a joint team with Université Paris-Diderot, and then created the ALMAnaCH team, of which he is director. He also holds a chair in the PRAIRIE institute dedicated to research in artificial intelligence, a field in which NLP fits in.

His research work, initially focused on syntactic analysis, formal grammars and the development of linguistic resources, is evolving in line with his field of research towards approaches based on machine learning and then deep learning. He is currently involved in the design and learning of language models, as well as their implementation, particularly in machine translation and text simplification, while exploring the interface between text and speech and text and image. He is also involved in the development of linguistic resources and research into computational linguistics. His work places particular emphasis on the diversity of the French language, but also on issues relating to less endowed languages.

He applies his NLP expertise as co-founder of Opensquare, a start-up specializing in the design, conduct, analysis and reporting of employee surveys.

Benoît Sagot has been invited to occupy the annual Computer Sciences and Digital Sciences Chair at the Collège de France for the year 2023-2024.